Hello, I am wanting to format my drive and reinstall everything. Problem is I do not have any spare cd's to back eveything upto first. I really need to do this tonight. My question is this: My HDD is 111gb in total with 60gb freespace. Is it possible to create a 20 gig partition from the 60 gig freespace so I can move all my music/videos etc? Then wipe the original partition and reinstall everything? If its possible would anyone happen to know what the best programs are for doing this please? thank you VERY much in advance!! :-)

Partition Magic is one of them... taurus

IMHO, a better solution would be to buy a second hard drive or a DVD recorder to back up everything. It's entirely possible that something could go wrong using a program like Partition Magic and you could lose everything.

No need of PM or similar utils. You say you have a 111Gig drive; 60Gig is unconfigured/unallocated space (i.e. you have 60Gig free space)? This being so... then use XP Disk Admin tools to configure the (unused/unconfigured) balance of drive as an Extended partition; then subdivide into two or more logical-drives - sizes as you prefer. Then transfer data across to the Extended/logical-drives. Verify that's it's all there and accessible. Afterwhich you can safely reformat and re-install the OS etc. to the Primary partition. Unless you're really careless or unlucky... data etc. should be safe in the Extended partition area. Ideally one would backup data off the system - regardless of whether or not it was in a separate partition to the OS/apps/utils etc.; but with data in the Extended partition (as above) it should be safe enough... Incidentally it's generally safer/wiser to have data in a partition that is separate from the one used for OS/apps/utils... It isolates data from the OS etc; allows a re-install of the OS etc. (even a reformat of the Primary partition - if need-be) and data is (should be) safe at all times.

Taurus: I have searched and found PM but the only version I find is V8.0 and its evaluation only, meaning you can use the function but not actually perform them, just a demo. annoying. trvlr: I have found the disk admin tool you speak of, but I cant seem to be able to workout HOW exactly to configure the unused space, cant find an option! im pretty stuck i guess.