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I chose one drive to repartition and copied/backed up my data. This particular hard drive was a 25GB drive that had only a few gigabytes free. I then moved as much data as I could off of it and backed up the rest. The only data left on the drive was mirrored elsewhere and purposely left to see whether BootIt NG would keep my data intact. With my data safe, I took the plunge.
BootIt NG is a 372.5KB download and installs onto a floppy disk. You then boot your computer with the floppy to install BootIt. BootIt will attempt to find a clean partition to install itself to, but if it can't find any (like during my installation), it will install on a "shared" partition (the C drive). I did find this installation a bit nerve-wracking, considering that I wasn't sure exactly what it was doing at the time, but BootIt did install smoothly. I was now ready to begin partitioning.
When I rebooted my computer I was presented with a basic boot menu with only one OS option, Windows 98 (the only OS I had installed). Along with that is a "Maintenance" option. Clicking that displayed a simple desktop with various BootIt's various functionality cleanly displayed (see screenshot below).
(Click for larger image)
I clicked on "Partition Work" and selected the hard drive I wanted to re-partition. Then I selected the new size of my current partition (5GB). I was prevented from setting the partition too small with a built-in minimum determined by the amount of data still on the drive. With all the settings in place, I let BootIt loose and sat back to watch the progress bar slowly move. It took about 30 minutes to repartition the 25GB drive into a 5GB drive and 20GB of unallocated space.
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Jason's Toolbox
