Partitioning and Driver Updates.

Hey everyone.
I was wondering if any of you have had a chance to repartition your laptop HDs that came with your laptop. I just recently purchased a Ferrari 4000 notebook ( made by acer and it came with windows XP Pro) and am not happy with how they partitioned the drive (they partitioned it to 45gigs and 45 gigs) I was hoping to get this down to or around 15-20 gigs for my C drive and the rest for my D drive, while at the same time not touching the hidden partition that was installed on my computer.

A few ways that I have considered to do this were:
a) purchase partition magic and redo the partitions that way
b) insert a copy of windows XP to delete the partitions and recreate them, and then reinstall the factory partition that came with my laptop onto the C drive.
I have done this many times using a a personal custom built desktop, so i am familiar on how to do this, and was wondering if it was the same for a notebook. One think i do not know how to do is to reinstall a back up copy of my system into a new partitions. Since my back-ups are bootable, would it just automatically promt me to install the back up onto a drive, or is there any special way of doing this?

I would like to carry this out using option B, but do not have much experience doing so with a laptop. A few questions that I have are if it is possible to do this that way, and was wondering if anyone has done it before so that i know it can be done. I already have several back-ups of my system (the hidden partition, recovery disks, and a burnt dvd back-up that acer required me to make), so i am not too worried about ruining anything.

What i wanted to make sure is if this is plausable or possible to do.

Also, I was wondering if anyone could guide me on how to update my ati video drivers on this notebook, since the ones that came with it are out of date. Would I have to use a program such as drive cleaner to clean out the drivers and then reinstall newer drivers, or is there another special way to do this? (The acer website does not currently have an updated version of the catalyst drivers up, so going to their website is not an option.) I had also called up tech support, and they couldnt help be because they can only troubleshoot with the factory default settings and drivers, and what is provided on the acer website for download.

Any help would be appriciated.
Thanks


Raven

Will you try to use for windows reinstalling windows that came with acer laptop? I had travelmate 4500 and windows that came with that laptop was in a from of ghost iso so there wasn't an option for setting up partition.


If you want newer video drivers look for omega ati drivers, these drivers for ati cards work both on laptops and desktops

meionm said:

Will you try to use for windows reinstalling windows that came with acer laptop? I had travelmate 4500 and windows that came with that laptop was in a from of ghost iso so there wasn't an option for setting up partition.


If you want newer video drivers look for omega ati drivers, these drivers for ati cards work both on laptops and desktops

Click to expand...

I have a copy of windows XP Pro that i bought a few years ago and that is what will allow me to partition my Hard drive. If you were to boot from the XP cd, it would load a few drivers into memory, then ask u a few questions and it will give you the option of deleting partitions and creating new ones of any size that you specify. I am actually going to try this out tonight, so i will post back up and let you know if it actually worked out.

I wasnt aware that the omega drivers could be used on the mobility ATI cards, but i will definately look into it. Thanks!

You could move files to partition D and then divide partition C to partition C and E. That way you would endup with partiton D at 45 gb and C and E at desired sizes

I was actually hoping to get the C: partition at 20 gigs and the rest allocated to the D: partition.

In the end it worked like a charm. All i did was boot up with my Windows XP Pro cd, deleted the pre created partitions, resized them the way i wanted them, and then i booted up using the recovery disks that came with my laptop, and the image that came on cd and on the HD was ghosted onto my C: drive. Now i have exactly what I wanted.

I must mention how impressed I was with these ghosted images. It let me reformat and instal windows with SP2 in 30 min!