Computer Question

Tom-D

Tom-D

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Tom-D
Can you remove a partition from a hard drive, without reformatting the hard drive and loosing all the files on the drive?
 
Not as straightforward as you might want, but you can backup the data you want to save to a separate drive (they're cheap), then reformat the original drive to eliminate the unwanted partition.

If you're trying to destroy data on the partition you want to get rid of that is pretty hard to do considering the technology available to recover digital evidence.
 
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What exactly are you trying to do Tom. I can see too many scenarios where I'd like to remove a partition.

Joe
 
I'm not too clear on what you want to do. Do you want to delete a partition but keep the files that are on that partition, or do you want to delete a partition without harming a different partition that contains the files you want to preserve?

-Rich
 
I assume you mean you have a C drive and a D drive, and you want to instead have one big C drive, right?

There's many reasons to not do this, but if this is what you'd like, you can do it within Linux using gparted, or possibly with Partition Magic in Windows.
 
I've used both the linux solutions and Partition magic, and as long as you don't care about losing the files on the deleted partition, it is easy as pie. If you want to save the files on the deleted partition, just copy them elsewhere for the meantime.
 
You folks are telling me that I must reformat the hard drive to remove the partition.

Pretty much what I thought.

My lap top is changing usage and needs the whole 40gig to do the Video editing, with Roxio capture program. that I am using to convert our old family VHS tapes to CD, and record our travels in the M/H it was used as a "on the Road, WIFI hot spot communicator" filing flight plans, staying in touch with family etc.

The computer works great, but it is a pain to have two hard drives and be required to choose which one to save to.

C:= full, family pictures, vids etc.
D:=empty

I believe I'l save the good stuff to a CD, and go ahead and reformat the drive.

any suggestions as to which operating system to use besides MS wonders.
 
I will add to the request, Any recommendations for inexpensive Video Editing software. My Son is trying to do some video editing for a High School project.
All I currently have is some very old ULEAD software.

Brian
 
brcase said:
I will add to the request, Any recommendations for inexpensive Video Editing software. My Son is trying to do some video editing for a High School project.
All I currently have is some very old ULEAD software.

Brian
Click to expand...

#1 - I am almost never the guy to say this...
#2 - Macs are phenomenal at video editing.
#3 - Ubuntu Studio has some great tools too.
 
Tom-D said:
You folks are telling me that I must reformat the hard drive to remove the partition.

Pretty much what I thought.

My lap top is changing usage and needs the whole 40gig to do the Video editing, with Roxio capture program. that I am using to convert our old family VHS tapes to CD, and record our travels in the M/H it was used as a "on the Road, WIFI hot spot communicator" filing flight plans, staying in touch with family etc.

The computer works great, but it is a pain to have two hard drives and be required to choose which one to save to.

C:= full, family pictures, vids etc.
D:=empty

I believe I'l save the good stuff to a CD, and go ahead and reformat the drive.

any suggestions as to which operating system to use besides MS wonders.
Click to expand...

No, you don't have to do that.

Any decent bootable hard drive utility can delete the empty partition and resize the C:\ partition to fill it.

Any computer tech should be able to do this for you. It's a routine thing.

-Rich
 
brcase said:
I will add to the request, Any recommendations for inexpensive Video Editing software. My Son is trying to do some video editing for a High School project.
All I currently have is some very old ULEAD software.

Brian
Click to expand...

Nothing particularly wrong with the ULEAD software, unless you want to use something else. It's one of several on my computer. But, I don't use any of them too often.
 
A couple of people have mentioned Partition Magic. I tried to buy an upgrade to it and was told that Symantec has discontinued it. The salesperson said a lot of people are buying Acronis Disk Director. I'm currently trying it out and it looks promising. The features are very similar to what Partition Magic had.
 
Tom-D said:
You folks are telling me that I must reformat the hard drive to remove the partition.

Pretty much what I thought.

My lap top is changing usage and needs the whole 40gig to do the Video editing, with Roxio capture program. that I am using to convert our old family VHS tapes to CD, and record our travels in the M/H it was used as a "on the Road, WIFI hot spot communicator" filing flight plans, staying in touch with family etc.

The computer works great, but it is a pain to have two hard drives and be required to choose which one to save to.

C:= full, family pictures, vids etc.
D:=empty

I believe I'l save the good stuff to a CD, and go ahead and reformat the drive.

any suggestions as to which operating system to use besides MS wonders.
Click to expand...


Might as well just get a 500GB drive for the computer and just have everything moved over. If you're going to do a lot of video work with it, you might as well.
 
There's a number of free/cheap repartitioning software that will do what you want but I agree with Henning; buy a bigger harddrive. They're cheaper still. Get yourself an external USB device to mount your old drive in when you copy the files over.
OR, just buy an external harddrive to keep all the stuff on. USB drives are cheap, big, and reliable. 40Gig is really small when you can get terrabytes in external devices for $100.
 
Tom-D said:
My lap top is changing usage and needs the whole 40gig to do the Video editing, with Roxio capture program. that I am using to convert our old family VHS tapes to CD, and record our travels in the M/H it was used as a "on the Road, WIFI hot spot communicator" filing flight plans, staying in touch with family etc.
Click to expand...

Tom,

I won't go as far as Henning, but...

Before you get into lots of video capture you want to think through what you plan to do with these movies and adjust your capture settings accordingly. It's one thing if you want cheesey little files to put on an iPhone or YouTube, something else entirely if you want files that'll look decent on a PC or the TV. Most consumer capture programs come with "cheesey" as the default. Unfortunately, once you've downgraded the data you can't upgrade it again. The other "unfortunately" is that video quality costs disk space. 40GB will get you started but it won't get you very far. I've about 30 hours of home movies captured at the highest possible setting - it takes up 750GB. Of course I've been accused of being anal. :rolleyes: See what settings work for you, then look at what kind of file size you're getting. Megabytes per minute is the yardstick to use. From that you can look at your pile of tapes and figure out how much disk space it'll take.

As you get into this project assume that at some point you're going to need more disk space. The easiest and cheapest way to do this is a USB drive. Best Buy is selling a 500GB Seagate and a 1TB Western Digital for $99.99 each - so you're not talking huge outlays of time or money. Performance won't be great, but it won't take you a couple days to put in a new drive and reconfigure the computer, either. Not to mention, the prices for internal laptop drives suggests they're made out of solid gold. I doubt the external drives will have the performance you need for capture, but they're fine for storage and playback. When you get to this point you'll still be capturing to the laptop, then moving the files to the external.
 
No matter what you do though, before starting anything serious make backups if you don't already have them.

Then make backups on a regular basis.
 
Joe B said:
As you get into this project assume that at some point you're going to need more disk space. The easiest and cheapest way to do this is a USB drive.
Click to expand...
Tom, Joe's advice is good.

I found my old VCR is on its last legs. I haven't used it in years, and when I tried to do it, the mechanism was so stiff that I had to fast (hah!) forward and rewind a tape for maybe 15 minutes to "limber up" the mechanism enough so that it would play the tape. That was the catalyst for me to transfer my home videos of the kids as infants on up. I used a software package that I can't remember the name of right now, and it was a sequential process: First, capture the video on the computer in some format, and then convert the format to DVD and burn the disc. Four video tapes came out to be about 100 Gigs of DVD.

The important part here is that the interim files were about 3x the DVD files. So the project took about 400 gigs of disc space to complete. I solved this by buying for about $100 a 1T external USB drive. It worked like a charm.

You may find a software package that will skip the interim file step. Be alert to whether you need room for the interim files or not.

Have fun with the project. Oh.... and don't start until you have some time, and a good book handy. It took my computer (2.5 Ghz processor) about 90 minutes per DVD to convert and burn the interim files.

-Skip
 
Henning said:
Might as well just get a 500GB drive for the computer and just have everything moved over. If you're going to do a lot of video work with it, you might as well.
Click to expand...

I went with a 320GB portable, moved all the stuff I wanted to save to it, and am in process of re-formatting the laptop hard drive, remove the partition, and cleaning all the fluff from it.

Then it will have the Roxio video capture program installed, and a very simple disk Operating system and Mozilla Firefox, and the Linksys wireless connection program to up load Vids to the Kids, when I'm near the Wifi hot spot.

I'll keep my Comcast.net address for the desktop, and enter it from my laptop wireless connection, to do E-mail.

No More windoz,
 
Skip Miller said:
Tom, Joe's advice is good.

I found my old VCR is on its last legs. I haven't used it in years, and when I tried to do it, the mechanism was so stiff that I had to fast (hah!) forward and rewind a tape for maybe 15 minutes to "limber up" the mechanism enough so that it would play the tape. That was the catalyst for me to transfer my home videos of the kids as infants on up. I used a software package that I can't remember the name of right now, and it was a sequential process: First, capture the video on the computer in some format, and then convert the format to DVD and burn the disc. Four video tapes came out to be about 100 Gigs of DVD.

The important part here is that the interim files were about 3x the DVD files. So the project took about 400 gigs of disc space to complete. I solved this by buying for about $100 a 1T external USB drive. It worked like a charm.

You may find a software package that will skip the interim file step. Be alert to whether you need room for the interim files or not.

Have fun with the project. Oh.... and don't start until you have some time, and a good book handy. It took my computer (2.5 Ghz processor) about 90 minutes per DVD to convert and burn the interim files.

-Skip
Click to expand...

Skip,,, That's about where I am, none of my old Scat works any more, we are doing what you did, 1 hour of VHS tapes now is about 807MB on the DVD. they play and sound really good (to me)

Thanks every one for the great advice, What DOS do you recommend other than Windoz? ........ RedHat?
 
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