Wellll, I had an interesting, and ultimately successful, evening. I foolishly allocated only 5 GB to my Windows/boot drive when I installed Windows on my main desktop machine a couple years ago. At this point, the Windows folder itself has bloated to over 3.5 GB, with nothing in it that I can safely remove, and I am running out of space very frequently.

So I fired up my Knoppix system tools CD (not sure where I got the ISO from, otherwise I'd provide a link), and started up GParted.

This is a handy tool that lets you move and resize partitions on an existing drive. It is very careful, testing everything before making changes.

My boot partition is one of about 7 partitions on my first IDE drive (80GB drive). I had space at the end of the drive, and was able to use GParted to resize the partitions, and shift them all "right" on the drive (my Windows boot partition was "first" on the drive, so I couldn't resize it without moving the partitions that came after it on the drive.

GParted took a while to validate the changes and shift all the data, but it worked flawlessly

I booted back into Windows and -boom- of course Windows decides that since the MFT and partition layout changes, it should reassign all my drive letters. Major breakage.

I rebooted Windows in safe mode and used the diskpart tool to attempt to assign drive letters back to the way they were. Of the 15 or so drive letters on my system (I have 3 hard drives, including the one that I was modifying, it would only let me explicitly assign one. Argh.

Of course Windows Disk Manager doesn't let you change auto-assigned drive letters either.

Fortunately, I came across the lovely article Q223188 in the Microsoft KB that points out the registry settings where the drive letter mappings happen. I swapped around letters, rebooted out of safe mode, and presto! Everything worked.

Hopefully this helps someone in the future

In my experience, the above is not exactly true, but you do need to perform some monkeying around w/ drive letter assignments to get things to work.

Say you have drive letters C, D, E, F, G and H all assigned (where the drives can be a mix of HDD's and CD/DVD drives).

1) Make sure there's a disc in each optical drive (i.e. CD/DVD drive). Disk Manager won't let you re-assign an optical drive's drive letter unless a disc w/ active volume is loaded in the drive.
2) Re-assign all the drive letters you want to move around to new "upper value drive letters" which are still available to be assigned to. In other words, do something like this...
Re-assign drive:

• C to Z
• D to Y
• E to X
• F to W
• G to V
• H to U
• and so on

After performing the re-assignments above, drive letters "C, D, E, F, G and H" will be freely available again in Windows Disk Manager to assign drives to. At that point re-assign your U, V, W, X, Y and Z drives to the corresponding "C, D, E... H" drive letters in the order that you want.

If you have more occupied drive letters than available free letters, do the reassignments in smaller groups. It may take several iterations, but it can be done.

Diggler

P.S. I haven't looked as the Microsoft KB article yet, but that method is probably faster.

Thanks for the tip, if/when I try this again, I'll let you know if that works. Windows is a strange OS

Thanks for the info BlueT. I hope I never need to try it though

I remember doing this with Partition Magic (I believe Partition Magic was not a Norton product until only recently).

I had to do the same thing a couple years later, picked up Norton Partition Magic, and...