Mememe,
Thanks :)

StrayCat,
Thanks for your advice, we are now working on it, hope we can impress you with our new version.

M. Aronson,
Thanks for your vivid description.
The package you downloaded contains portable edition, just copy it to your thumb drive and run, no further requirements, the portable edition is easy to use when comes to partition issues.

HawaiiTex,
Thanks,
Just use "copy volume" function from left column.

HawaiiTex,
Thanks for your support~

gbt,
Not yet, sorry.

BAW30s,
You make it sound a really attractive program so I downloaded and registered the portable version, and you are right a really attractive easy-to-use interface.
The portable version was also a pleasant surprise in its ease of registration: extracted it to a folder and ran the EXE file, entered the registration code, this created key files in the folder, moved the folder to my flash drive.
It ran from the flash drive without the slightest difficulty.

Thanks for your comment, without your help I wouldn't have had a partition program on my flash drive.

Seb,
I am really glad that the comments helped: it will also be helpful in future to know about the program's effectiveness when run from a flash drive!

John M,
I deleted a partition once and lost a bunch of stuff
kept working to find a tool to recover
A Minitool product saved me. might want to give it a try

John M,

If you have not put anything on the drive you should be able to recover your partition. A lot of partition software can get it back. Google recover partition. Acronis Disk Director does it and many free ones too.

John M,

"I wish this giveaway came out 24 hours ago because my big attempt to learn how to partition my hard drive last night ended up with me deleting years of information from my backup WD external hard drive."

In case it helps... Many of the recovery tools that have been offered on GOTD can attempt to recover the partition tables, assuming that they were damaged. Some recovery & some disk tools also have the ability to rebuild those tables. Briefly, those tables list where all the parts of each file are located physically on the HDD, as well as account for the size of the partition, so hopefully everything you want/need is still there.

"Should I just Disable Driver Signature Verification."

I routinely install drivers that have not been signed or that have not been certified by Microsoft myself, but I'm not sure anyone will [or should] tell someone else to ignore a security feature of Windows.

Mike, I found out last night also that a WD external HD has a PCB board with a controller chip for partition on it, I removed HD to put into different case only to find this out, So I reinstall back in first case with the PCB board, pc then found partition with my music folders 153gb. "So this tells me the PBC card has controller chip storing partition info" copy over to a different HD, then removed HD, formatted and moved HD to other case. Reason case change was only new enclosure had a on - off button. It's all good now. Just wanted you to know about the PCB card in WD My Book enclosure. It's hooks up to HD power & Sata ports inside case.

Mike also

Bingo: Lovely idea, 'the Hall of Fame'. They're the contributors who helped make GOTD what it is and, as you say, are much missed.

Sadly, my ol' brain's a bit too tired to summon up the name of the deservedly founding member of the Hall of Fame, but perhaps someone else on here can do so (White Rabbit: can you remember?) He went under the most unlikely posting ID and was the lead GOTD contributor from GOTD's Day 1, long before Ashraf debuted.

Also much missed is XP Man, both for the quality of his posts and as a fantastic reminder that no-one should ever believe what Microsoft says in its attempts to manipulate computer users into feeding its profits flow: XP Man demonstrated time and time again that XP. . . lives. I just hope, he still does, too.

Nowadays, however, all is far from lost, with Oootje doing some really sterling work and, but of course, Mike (who though my namesake is entirely unrelated.) Mike has consistently provided some of the best written and quietly authoritative contributions GOTD has ever seen.

In fact -- speaking as one with a particular interest in video / audio -- Mike is the resource to whom everyone should turn to when impartial, definitive guidance is needed. (Sorry, Mike: don't want to increase your workload!)

Finally. . . kudos to GOTD itself, unique in the way it facilitates honest and, oft times, even hostile comment in regard to the very promotions it happens to be running. Long may this site continue: the first of the giveaway sites and, all these years later, still the best.

Bingo, Right you are, I forgot about Karl. I wonder what happend to at least the three we mentioned. I know all three of them took a little heat from a few members but we, as fans, outnumbered the negitive few. Thanks for the reminder. John M.

MikeR, Well said and right again Mike, XP Man Clap, clap, clap, clap

*** Thanks to the moderator for letting us take a trip down memory lane ***

Thanks to Bingo, Mike R, Kis, Mike W, Joe, Mike, I hope I got everyone. Thanks for the info on my missing back up. It's a My Passport Essential 320 GB that I accidently deleted while in disk management on my laptop. When I reilized my mistake I ejected the WD drive and I haven't put anything else on it. I'll look for a program and any link to minitool and data recovery software online. Mike W. very interresting about the PC board. My WD has been in and out of the case. I used it in my old Gateway laptop when it's HD died.

I'll also Disable Driver Signature Verification and finish my Macrorit

*** My apoliges to the other members and again to the mods and Macrorit® Co., LTD. I'll let you get back to busines again. Thanks to GOTD I wait every early AM for my favorite email telling us the days giveaway. Thanks to all. John M. ***

Drek Meek,
maybe this could help: http://pcsupport.about.com/od/partition-management-software/tp/free-disk-partition-software.htm

Seb,

"Ashraf was not impressed with the program and to be honest before I tested it I would have to find some in depth reviews, you don't mess with partitions so I'll give it a miss."

Purely FWIW... Working with hard drives for the most part isn't all that difficult -- software company A tries to distinguish itself from company B by adding features, with their GUI, or as in the case I believe with Macrorit, by using optimized code that performs tasks faster. In admittedly limited use [I only need to work with partitions somewhat rarely], Macrorit has worked as well for me as EaseUS, Paragon, & AOMEI.

The danger in working with partitions is that you'll lose some or all of the data stored there if something goes wrong [& something can always go wrong]. Partitioning software can mitigate that by never removing data from one physical location until it's been verified the same data exists somewhere else, but IMHO the safest bet is to have partition image backups before you start -- restoring an image backup puts things back exactly as they were.

Because I'm a big believer [& user] of disk/partition image backups, I actually use those more than partitioning apps when/if I need to work with partitions... assuming you use all of a drive's storage capacity, you can't add or expand one partition without reducing the size of another partition --- since I have a partition image backup already, I just restore that, setting the partition's new size at the same time.

mike,
My main drive is split into many partitions as have all my previous hard drives.
On many occasions I have modified their size, remove them, added them without the slightest problem.
I have never backed up before working with the partitions, but having said that one thing I do is prepare the drive beforehand.

Get rid of all the junk, and defrag the drives, make sure that what I want to do is feasible regarding size and space.

Then I do the partition work I need using a program that is simple to use so that I have no doubt about what I am doing.

My favourite paid version is by Minitool and the free version I like is by EaseUS.

My reply to mike was a statement of facts and the six people who marked me down have totally confused me, are they disputing the facts for disagreeing with them.
Possibly if they learn to write they could make a comment!

Seb, Just don't do it on a Win10 upgrade from 7 or 8. They hide another partition in there after the upgrade, and when Windows decided I ran out of space on C, after deleting or moving things to other partitions or an external drive, I decided to increase space there by resizing 2 other partitions, using EaseUS or Partition Master, I forget. It hung looking like it was thinking for an hour or two (it said it would take more than an hour) and then it killed my PC. The following horror story is true - and apparently it has happened to a whole lot of people who upgraded to Win10 from 7 or 8, based on questions on Microsoft's tech forums and those of several other tech help sites.

First, no can boot, then when booting to recovery options, can't fix Startup or anything else. I went into Command Line and all my stuff was still there, but it thought it was wiped. Apparently the MBR or something got confused by the resizing - since C had no space beyond a few hundred Mb (in spite of the partition shifts and deleting or moving stuff ) and the old hidden Recovery drive was suddenly showing up between C: and the partitions I was resizing, so it wouldn't save anything to C. Finally, I tried some other stuff - like restoring from a restore point - it didn't have any, huh? Tried a system image ISO. Didn't find it on the external drive (which it did see). Tried another one from a DVD. Nothing. Didn't want to reset because that would wipe everything - but it didn't see it having anything anywhere in there! So I copied it to the hard drive, hung the PC, and then when I tried to boot again, it said no OS was found, remove any devices without an OS and reboot, which began a loop. It didn't see the ISO with the OS in the disk drive. Didn't see anything on a couple USB sticks with various recovery and repair programs. Wasted an awful lot of time and nerves trying to get it to work again!

The advice given by Microsoft is useless if your PC is dead because of this, and you don't have access to another PC to download and burn stuff - we don't all have work PCs or second Win computers at home, and I was looking up all this info on an Android tablet. My neighbors across the street only have Mac stuff. SOL! 1 Tb HDD, sitting in an ASUS with 8 GB of Ram, useless. Attached to 2 TB Seagate external drive it could see but not work with more than copying back and forth without doing any operations on anything. Using DOS in Command Line, and how long has it been since I used DOS?!???!!!

I need to pull out the HDD and use it with a new computer that I have to buy. With an SSD instead of HDD for primary OS!!! And keep the SSD with minimal data, photos, clipart, music, docs, etc.! Expensive lesson on how not to partition a Win10 upgrade!

Mindymac,
Only just read iyour excellent comment, I'm not keeping up to date with different OSs produced by Microsoft.
I'm on XP, do have Windows 7 which I don't use and will not be getting any of the later Microsoft OS's what ever happens.

You brought up aspects that I hadn't considered, these aspects certainly make working on partitions a much more dangerous prospect.
Comments like yours really make this site worthwhile and I thank you for it.

No button pressers, please add comments instead of just pressing no it makes the site so much more useful.