Ulitmate Boot CD & Ranish Partition Manager
Ranish Partition Manager is what it's name implies, a partition manager. It is menu driven, which in my experience creates a better user experience than other command-line tools such as fdisk.
Ultimate Boot CD, UBCD for short, is a collection of a variety of software ranging in use from diagnostics to utilities to boot managers and is completely free as in beer. UBCD is fairly straight-forward and is explained on the Tutorials section of Ultimate Boot CD's website.
In addition to CD booting, UBCD can also be installed to boot from a USB drive. The following directions are for use with Windows, including XP and Vista. For more information, see the originating website.
- Download the HP USB format tool and format your stick using a Fat 16 or Fat 32 file system
- Download and launch UBCDfix2.exe, a UBCD folder is created
- Download the UBCD ISO, and move to your UBCD folder
- From the UBCD folder, click fixubcd2.bat and follow the instructions on screen
- Reboot and set your computer to Boot from the USB device
- On next launch, you should be booting Ultimate Boot CD from your USB drive
Once UBCD is booted select :
- Filesystems,
- Partition Tools, and then
- Ranish Partition Manager
At this point, UBCD begin loading Ranish Partition Manage. While the partition manager is being loaded, several screens worth of text and prompts will display. These prompts are self-answering and require no input on your behalf. The last prompt, which displays for 30 seconds can be closed manually.
Finally, you'll see a blue menu-driven screen. This is Ranish Partition Manager. At this point, you are now ready to partition your drive as you wish.
For more information, see Ranish Partition Manager's website or Ultimate Boot CD's website