I am looking to buy a new laptop fromToshiba - and wish to divide the hard drive into several partitions - I am told that is not possible.
Can anyone tell me how this can be achieved or should I but Vista seperately to have this ability.

Hijdo and welcome to the WTT forums


Some new computers that have Windows XP pre-installed will give you the option when setting up your machine of having one large partition for the whole of the C drive or a separate partition for data. I have not seen this feature on any recent Toshiba I have set up but it is a prominent and useful facility that is included in some Fujitsu computers.

Your other options are to get your retailer to carry out this task for you (as part of the purchase deal), get a local competent computer technician to do it for you (this will obviously cost you, but could prove to be a good investment) or do it your self using either paid for, or free partitioning utilities.
Please be very careful when using a partitioning tool...even experts have been known to get it wrong and the results of an error in procedure can be time consuming to fix.

Before you do anything at all it would be best to go here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/361688/MINIX-3-T...Disk-Partitions
and study the material carefully , this will give you a good introduction to the subject and probably stimulate further areas for research.

Towards the end of the page are links to various partitioning tools that are worth investigating. (your favourite search engine will no doubt be able to unearth several others.)

I have used Paragon Products for many years and find then excellent , however as always the choice is yours.

Most Toshiba laptop computers come already equipped with a separate partition, usually called "Recovery" that will often enable you to restore your machine to its "factory" condition (only for use in the event of serious trouble that cannot be resolved by more conservative means) and it's important that you get the retailer to explain the workings of this to you and that you do not inadvertently remove it by the use of partitioning tools.
Regards
paws

A friend had a similar problem, he had me help him set up his new toshiba laptop for remote dj work, this was my first opportunity to work on a vista computer, his was running home premium.

Even tho it came with recovery disks it also had a an 8 gig recovery partition, I left that alone. I could only shrink the main system partition to 100 gigs at first until I turned off system restore, after turning it off I shrank it down to 45 gigs, later I shrank it again to 35 gigs after turning restore back on.

This was a great enhancement of an operating system.