Can I extend the FAT / NTFS Partition in Win NT 4.0

[Akbar_1]

Dear All,

Can I able to extend the existing FAT / NTFS partition in Winnt 4.0 ? I think I can do the same in HP-UX for any of the logical volumes and filesystems but in NT or microsoft related product is it possible ?

Pl. help me on the same ASAP.

[CHRIS_ANORUO]

Hi Akbar,

You can not extend FAT or NTFS as it is done iHPUX. The only way is to reformat the drives and recreated them through the Disk Administrator. This can only be done on other drives that are not "C:" or where the NT apllication software is residing.


Cheers!

[Joseph T. Wyckoff]

Well...it depends...

First of all the kind of functions you see in UX (jfs/vxfs) are not quite present in nt4, but nt2000 has very similar tools - HP and Microsoft both licensed the functionality from Veritas.

Only the vocabulary has changed.

You can in fact extend a volume set on NT - but I need to caution you, in my experience this is a bad idea. It requires NTFS, and it is fairly well documented by Microsoft. The tool is disk administrator.

A common issue on the NT platform is that you have outgrown your hardrive, and you replace it with a bigger hardrive...only to find that you have also outgrown your partitions.

You can use an aftermarket partition managment utility to make partitions larger or smaller, but there is a risk that you will damage data.

Partition Magic is a utiltiy I have used, and I think it could even resize a FAT partition...but you need to be cautious.

Have a good backup (or several...) before you begin, read the manuals, etc...

Good Luck.

[Michael Francisco]

Easiest way to extend NT partitions is to use a third party program like Partition Magic - works well...a non-system NTFS partion can be extended using Windows NT's Disk Administrator - select both the partion you want to extend and the available space and click on "Extend Volume Set" from the "Partition" menu.

[Brian Sandison]

Hi Akbar, just to add another angle on this - you can use the program "GHOST" (I think Norton own this now) to create an image of your partition - (even the boot partition) and you can then "ghost" it back on to a larger one if required. You have to know exactly what you are doing however.
Ghost lets you specify the exact size you want. Probably the easiest way is boot to network drive using DOS disk and ghost partition to an image file. Then use fdisk to create the required size (not really necessary but makes things clearer) and then "ghost" partition from image file you created earlier.

We have used this many times to give a user a new PC (with bigger hard disk) without changing anything on their disk (other than free space!)

This is probably not possible if you have multiple partitions already created on your system unless they are all on separate disks.

Warning..Practice is definitely required first!

BS.

[Brian Sandison]

Hi Akbar.

As someone posted earlier, you can use NT Disk Administrator to extend a volume set if it is NTFS and you have a portion of Free Space showing as a seperate segment. (but not the system partition where NT resides!).
If this is your situation, here is how...
BACKUP your system...
then, launch disk administrator, highlight the partition you wish to extend, hold down the CTL key and click on the portion of "Free Space" (it should be cross-hatched)then from the menu above, click Partition, Extend Volume Set. Free Space should then become part of the original partition. No need to format it.

NB if you could try this on a test PC to familiarise yourself with disk admin it would be best....

BS.