... by the way, Boot-It will ALWAYS warn you that you can "lose everything" before you do any major partition restructuring operation.   That's a simple fact that's true with ANY product that does in-place manipulation of partitions.   But the ONLY thing I'd be concerned about if you're doing this with Boot-It is if you were to lose power during the operation => if your system's on a UPS, that's not an issue.   Trust it -- it's a very well written, focused, does-exactly-what-it-says little utility.   An excellent boot manager; and a superb partition management utility.   The only criticisms I have of it are the somewhat "geeky" interface, and the very limited status info it provides (just a not-very-informative bar) during the partition operations.   But it always works !!

... one last thought:  "Sliding" is probably the safest of the various partition operations.  Since the partition is not being modified in any way except its physical location on the disk, there's nothing being done to it structurally.   Re-Sizing is a much more "dangerous" operation (but not all that "dangerous") --> although making a partition smaller is more "dangerous" than making it larger.   But, as I've already said several times, Boot-It does all of these just fine :-)

... well, perhaps the above wasn't my "last" thought before heading to bed :-)   After you make these changes to the partition structure, Windows will "find new hardware" when you next reboot => this is NORMAL -- it's simply noticing that the disk has changed its size!!   Reboot again and you won't get the warning anymore.

Clarification:  "... simply noticing that the disk has changed its size!!" ==> means the "logical" disk (i.e. the C: "disk" -- actually a partition).

So I should slide the d: partition out of the way, and then resize c:?

I was going to slide c: ? If I slide d:  should I do "data only"  or leave that box unchecked and do the whole thing

thanks

You can't slide C: => there's no space to slide it to.  Think of the disk like this:

CCCCCCCDDDDDDDD........................................B

where the C's represent C:, the D's represent D:, the .'s represent free space, and B is the Boot-It partition.   "Sliding" is doing conceptually just that -- sliding the partition one direction of the other;  but there has to be free space for it to "slide" in.

So if you Slide D: so you have free space in front of it, the picture will look like this:

CCCCCCC..............DDDDDDDD..........................B

NOW you can ReSize C:, since there's some free space after it.   So if you use all of that free space, the drive will look like this:

CCCCCCCCCCCCCCDDDDDDDD..........................B

... and C: will have the new space you want.

If you "Slide" D: all the way to the right (e.g. put the max space - 70GB "before" it and zero space "after" it), then you could add all 70GB of free space to C:
If you did this, the "after sliding" picture would be:

CCCCCCC..........................................DDDDDDDDB
and the "after resizing" picture would be:
CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCDDDDDDDDB

But of course in that case you'd have NO additional free space for any future adjustments of either C: or D:   => although you could always resize one smaller; slide the other as needed; and resize the other :-)

OK great illustration, now I understand.

should I do data only?  Or the whole thing?

Data only simply means it only rewrites those sectors that contain data -- so the slide will be faster (much faster if there's a lot of free space in D:).   I always use that setting, and have never had a problem.   The only reason I can think of to not use it would be if you're using a 3rd party encryption program that "hides" the data in "unused" sectors -- in a case like that you could lose some data.

... by the way, the only application I'm aware of that does what I was referring to above is TrueCrypt.

Gary,
That is a nice way of explaining it, could almost be one of Fred Langa's explanations. If I ever need to I'll explain it the same way.

Martin

@garycase - Just to let you know - I used this to refresh my memory of your prior instructions on Bootit NG and it was perfect.
I just did two XP boxes in about 30 seconds each - great product and great instructions.
Vic