A few general Vista questions
Hi there,
I'm not sure if this was the right place to post my question, but it seemed to be the most appropriate.
I recently bought an Acer Aspire laptop (Model 5610Z) running windows Vista. It promised a 120GB HDD, but when I got it home, I saw that it had been split into to partitions of ~52GB each. The only file on the second partition was one that I later found out was from Windows Updates (it was a log file) and after a bit of browsing, I found that it was safe to delete it. So, I have a partition with absolutely nothing on it.
I found disk management through Control Panel, and found a list of partitions. I thought it would be as simple as just right clicking and pressing delete partition (I was going to delete the second partition) and then expanding the other. However, I got a warning message that it was in use, and that I could force a delete if I wanted, but it could cause unexpected errors, so I left it. I then tried to just lower the second partition to a really small amount, but it would only decrease by ~26GB and I was unable to expand the size of the main partition anyway.
I asked for help on another forum, and a lot of people recommended decreasing the size of my main partition to ~30GB for my Windows files and programs, and increasing the other one to ~90GB to store all of my documents/music etc. They also recommended that I use something such as Partition Manager to do it, as changing partitions within Windows is (either) difficult or impossible (I forget which one). However, I got a message within Vista that PM has 'known compatibility issues' with it. Instead, I decided that I would just deal with the partitions the way they were, and use the current partition until it was full and then start using the second one. However, when I tried to mark the second partition as active, I got a message telling me that I should only mark it as active if it contained a functioning OS otherwise it could cause my computer to stop working. So I decided to leave it.
After this, I asked again on the other help forum, and I was directed to thefreecountry.org. Here I found a program called 'Cute Partition Manager', which I burnt to a disc and (after changing the boot order in the BIOS settings) booted up from it. However, it was not very useful.
So, I'm wondering how to change/delete partitions. I didn't get a specific boot disk with my laptop, or is the Windows Anytime Upgrade disk my boot disk? I was prompted to create some backup disks when I first used my laptop, though I doubt those are my boot disks.
Does anyone know of a way to do this? And, if not, I'd like to know a few other things:
Am I allowed to reformat my HDD and install Vista onto it again? This would solve the problem completely, as I could choose the partition sizes for myself. However, somebody on the other forum said that you're only allowed to use your product key once? Will I have to reactivate the key, or will it be ok?
Any help is much appreciated as I'm feeling a little frustrated :).
Thanks!
PS: To the mods, if I've posted this in the wrong place, please move it. But could you please tell me where you've moved it to, as I'm new to these forums and have no idea where to look :).
