Here is a question I received in email...

I have a 120GB Hard Drive that was getting full. I purchased a new 500GB drive and used Symantac Ghost software to copy the 120GB partition on to my new 500GB drive. The computer boots just fine off the new 500GB drive, but I now have a 120GB partition on the new 500GB drive so I didn't gain any new free space. How do I make use of the 380GB of free space? Why didn't Ghost use all of my 500GB when I copied the 120GB drive contents to the 500GB drive?

In order to solve this problem, the 120GB partition must be "resized". A 3rd party utility will be necessary to do this operation. There are many available ranging in price from $20 to $120. A search of the Internet will provide several choices of such utilities. Just make sure that the utility supports the type of partition you have. NTFS or FAT32 are the two most common partition types. There is a free utility, but it does not work with NTFS partitions and most modern Windows partitions are now NTFS.

I should also add that you could start over and when you use Ghost to copy the partition you get to specify the size of the new partition. It shows you the current partition size and what the max amount of space is and gives you the option of changing the size right there. Many people are afraid to make this change because they don't know what it's talking about. It's displaying the partition size in cylinder counts or something like that. But it's also showing you the max available on the new drive, so just use the max number and it will copy your old smaller partition onto the new drive and increase the partition size to be the max you can have on the drive.

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Hi there! 21 Jan 10
I have just downloaded the Wreck Disc program and my Window XP will not open it! What went wrong?
I am trying to REMOVE a middling partition from my Acer laptop hard drive (retaining the "C" side) in order to gain full usage of the space available by reducing (or eliminating) the "D" side.
Is this similar to the above quoted question from 25 Oct 08?!
Do i have the correct program to do this?

Please advise as soon as possible, thank you -
Alhadji Dean

What do you mean when you say "my Windows XP will not open it!" ? There are two types of formats that you could have downloaded, the Diskette Format or the CD format, so I first need to know which of those you have to be able to begin to answer your question.

If you downloaded the Diskette Format, you must double click the file you downloaded with a blank floppy diskette in your diskette drive. The "program" you downloaded will then create a "bootable" floppy diskette that you can use to remove all partitions from your hard disk drive.

If you downloaded the CD format, you must use CD Burning software like IMGBURN to create a bootable CD from that image file that you downloaded.

For both formats above, if you have successfully created the bootable Diskette or the bootable CD and your computer is not reading them upon boot up, you probably need to change the BIOs (also know as CMOS) settings of your computer to tell it to boot from Diskette or CD BEFORE attempting to boot from your hard drive. Most computers allow you to enter your BIOs setup by pressing either the DELete key, the F2 key, or the F10 key when the computer is first powered on. It's different for different manufacturers.

Lastly, BE CAREFUL! It's likely that both the C drive partition and the D drive partition "live" on the same physical hard drive. If that is true, then when you use WreckDisk it will remove ALL partitions from the hard drive. For example, if you have your Windows installed on Drive C: and there is a Drive D: that is something the manufacturer put on your machine to allow you to recover your computer, when you use WreckDisk on that machine both C and D will be gone. Your computer will no longer load windows and nothing saved on either C or D will be available to you. You must boot from your Windows CD to being installing windows on the now clean hard drive. And it will allow you to create a new C partition that is the total size of what C and D together were. So to do this operation, without losing any data or your current windows installation, you must first make a full backup of your Windows install partition to CD or other external device and make certain that you can boot from some other portable device and gain access to the other external device so you can restore your C partition from it after you have used wreckdisk.

If you have some more specific questions I'd be happy to address them.