Thanks again for your suggestions

1. My primary partitions are contiguous, which I checked, but I'm confused
about my logical partitions, esp. about the locations of EPBRs. I just don't
feel it. I display them below for your opinion

Vol. PartType Status PartSect # StartSect TotalSects
Ext.X Pri 0 2 93,675,015
39,776,940
EPBR Log None -- 93,675,015
24,177,825
D: FAT32 Log 93,675,015 0 93,675,078 24,177,762
EPBR Log 93,675,015 1 117,852,840
15,599,115
E: FAT32 Log 117,852,840 0 117,852,903 15,599,052

Disk Geometry Info: Cyl: 19457, Head: 255, Sect/Track: 63

2. Yes, I'd copy everything. The good thing about this is that you will have a backup in case your disk crashes

You're completely right about the backup, but I rather meant remaking of my
logical partitions from scratch (without necessity to resize anything, i.e.
by taking the necessary space directly from the Unallocated partition -
adjacent to them) and then copying back all files from the USB stick. I hope
that then I should be free of any artifacts of the previous moving and
resizing operations, if any. Am I right?

3. As far as I remember, PowerQuest developed own methods of performing
various operations on partitions, with intelligent double-checking, and they
never disclosed them to the public. Instead, they have just patented them.
You can see below some of the numbers of the patents involved that they refer
to in their manual.
"This product and/or its use may be covered by one or more of the following
patents: 5,675,769; 5,706,472; 5,930,831; 6,088,778; 6,108,697; 6,108,759;
6,173,291; 6,178,487; 6,178,503; 6,185,575; 6,185,666; 6,253,300; 6,330,653;
and 6,377,958. Additional patents may be pending."

Regards,
Andrew


"Steven Saunderson" wrote:

On Tue, 1 Jun 2010 14:34:01 -0700, Andrew
wrote:

partinfo.exe for Win98 displays a nice table on the screen, which can be
copied to any document. In addition, there are several options to choose
from, e.g. Save As, Copy to Clipboard and more. I saved the results, as the
.txt file. It's only 22K.

This sounds good. I'd save the list(s) so you can check that your
primary partitions are still contiguous at the start of the disk. I
doubt that many people are concerned with partitions and disk layouts
nowadays (except when something goes wrong) so the subject is a bit of a
black art. It's quite simple really but just a bit alien.

In case everything fails, wouldn't be reasonable to:
- copy all files from D: and E: to a USB stick
- delete the D: and E: partitions from my drive
- delete my Extended partition
- resize the WinXP partition, let's say to 45 GB
- create the Extended partition
- create the D: and E: partitions (this time a bit bigger)
- copy the files from the USB stick back to D: and E:

Yes, I'd copy everything. The good thing about this is that you will
have a backup in case your disk crashes.

If you play with ptedit I'll be interested to hear how it goes.

Cheers,
--
Steven
.