Is it possible to partition the hard disk after installing the Windows OS?

Yes. You just need an app that can resize the partition.

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I did this on xp with gparted live. had to fix the mbr after but it worked. I thought I heard that vista and 7 had built in tools for this, but I could be wrong. I hardly ever use windows so not 100% on that but its definitely possible.

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Vista has a build-in tool. It's very slow and unresponsive, but it works.
Personally, I always recommend a reïnstall if possible. This is not something to mess with. In the least, take backups.

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just don't use partition magic, it'll eventually break the OS.

if you've got USB support on the box just spend a few bucks
and buy a USB external drive.

or rebuild

Thank you all for the quick response. I was just wondering is it good to work on single partition with C:\ . If some thing goes wrong with the OS how to retrieve the data in Vista? Also will it be slow if i work on single partition?

It all depends on what kind of data you are attempting to recover. If the OS goes down, there's still a chance that you can just pop in a Linux live cd and gain access to the filesystem (or whats left of it). If you are looking for a more extreme data recovery method, there are some programs out there that can do a bit-per-bit recovery and rebuild to try to recover certain files.

Even if you create separate partitions, they are still on the same hard drive, so if its a hardware failure your outta luck. You can keep the OS data on a separate partition if you tinker with it too much and end up breaking it a lot, but chances are that it wont make it any more resilient than if it were all on the same partition.

When it comes to speed, it all depends on the overall speed of your hard disk i.e. 5400, 7200, ssd, etc. Having two partitions on the same disk I don't think will make things any slower or quicker (but don't quote me on that one, i'm just thinking mechanical)

Thanks dan

yes, many partition software can do this without reinstall OS.
i think the article about resize partition vista can help you clear. (:


mellowd: removed url

again, try gparted live. works great. I even used it to shrink ntfs partitions. all I had to do was shrink and then fix mbr.

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