Hello all, i have 2 HDD, one has win xp on it, the other has just movies on it. the one with movies on has 131gb of movies on it and 100gb of free space. I want to allocate 50gb of it to a FAT32 partition. can i reallocate 50gb without wiping the movies? if so, how do i do it?
I don't think I can answer your questions, but perhaps I can clarify some of them. It sounds like you have a 240GB data drive with one large FAT32 partition. That partition is filled with 131GB of data and 100GB of free space. What it sounds like you want is to take half of that 100GB of free space and reduce the size of your primary partition by that amount and allocate a new partition consisting just of that 50GB of free space. In theory this would then leave you with two independent partitions: one containing your 131GB of data and 50GB of free space and the other containing just 50GB of free space.
The two problems I see with effecting that scenario is that neither your data nor free space areas are necessarily contiguous. You undoubtedly have free space scatter in and amongst your data space and I'm sure you have data scattered throughout your free space. This is called file fragmentation.
So your first task would be to de-fragment your entire 231GB partition to pull all of your data down to one end, while pushing all of your free space to the other. There are numerous utilities that can perform that task.
Your second task would be to contract the size of your existing partition so it is 50GB shorter. This is assuming after de-fragging the partition you no longer have any data segments scattered at that end. I am unaware of specific utilities that can do this for you, but I am sure they are available.
Your third task would to have Windows create a new partition using just this now-unallocated 50GB of free space. This new partition will need to be re-formatted, which is why we need to ensure there is nothing in it than free/unused space. Once completed this new partition would have its own drive letter and be logically independent from your other drives/partitions.
I would bet anything that there are current partition editing utilities that can reliably perform all of those tasks in much less time that I have taken to describe them, I just don't know the names of specific ones to recommend to you. I leave that to the other knowledgeable people on this forum.
As for your ps3 concerns, I am totally ignorant and will sit back and learn with you from the others.
