GParted notes

gparted is very reliable, but you may still crash your PC because you don't put the right partitions at the right place… Make sure you know what you are doing, and if possible, make a backup of the disk with Clonezilla before!

Creating a gparted boot USB stick

Choosing the partitions for a Windows 7 system

Do not forget the following when choosing the new partitions

It's probably better to keep the Dell/HP hidden partitions even if you don't know what they are for (you may be able to reduce their size)

If you have an accelerated disk, leave some empty space (4-8 Mb) at the end of the disk, otherwise you will not be able to re-activate the disk acceleration…

Keep 85-100 Go for the Windows 7 system C: partition

Use at least 1 extra partition besides C: and keep all the important information on this partition (not C:)

You can have a maximum of 4 primary partitions

The access to the partitions at the beginning of the disk is faster (unless you have a SSD disk)

Do you need to have some encrypted partitions?

Are you going to backup full partitions with Clonezilla?

…

Creating the partitions

Prerequisites

WARNING! If you have a mSATA SSD disk to accelerate your system, you have to disable the acceleration

A gparted boot USB stick

Steps

Make sure that booting on a USB storage is activated in the BIOS

Connect the USB stick to the machine

Switch on the machine and choose the following options

GParted live or Other modes of GParted live ⇒ To RAM

Default keyboard (Don't touch keymap)

Default language (US English)

Continue to start X and wait for the GParted graphical interface to appear

Select the disk that you want to partition in the pull-down menu

WARNING! Do not do anything if there is nothing displayed in the Used and Unused columns. It's possible that you have a cache accelerated disk. You have to disable the acceleration before you do anything else

Check the existing partitions, and decide what the new partitions should be

WARNING! WARNING! If you have an accelerated disk, leave some empty space (4-8 Mb) at the end of the disk, otherwise you will not be able to re-activate the disk acceleration…

Create the list of partitioning operations

Apply the list

Shutdown the machine, remove the USB stick and boot the machine again

Check in Windows that everything seem correct

Do not worry if Windows starts an automatic disk check during the first boot!

Enable the acceleration again

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