Toshiba NB200 Single Partition

NOTE: Only try this if you are very brave! I'm not responsible for you if you screw up and erase any of your data! Be super careful, awake and not drunk!

I don't like the way Toshiba sends out their NB200 with two partitions, C and D. I prefer a single one. Well on a NB200, without an external DVD drive, (but I do have a USB hard drive and USB Flash Memory Stick) this is what I did using Norton Ghost 14:

1) First, create a bootable USB Norton Rescue SRD memory stick using these instructions

http://krisrowland.wordpress.com/2008/09/26/boot-norton-ghost-14-srd-from-a-usb-stick/

First, I created a Norton Recovery DVD (or cd, it is only 300mb) using Ghost 14 (This is the SRD)
Then boot my old laptop using this SRD DVD, and put in the memory stick afterwards.
-Choose Analyze, Open a command shell, then follow the instructions in the above post.

hint, after you do the select disk, do another list disk just to make sure you select the right one, any mess up now, and you can format your hard drive!!!

it took a while to format a 1GB memory stick.

After the format, you can copy everything from the SRD while still running Norton, use AnalyzeExplore my computer.

2) Next, install Ghost 14 onto the netbook - I copied the INstall directory from the Norton DVD onto my USB hard drive. Hooked up the USB HD to my NB, and ran setup.exe for Norton Ghost.

3) I didn't have much on my netbook, but I'd gone through the trouble of cleaning off all the bloatware, and didn't really want to buy a portable DVD writer just to create the rescue disk. I'd rather use Norton Ghost for everything anyway, and save an image of the C: drive to my USB hard drive. Same difference, no?

So, run Ghost 14 on the NB, and backup C: to the USB HD. D: only had the backup image, but I backed it up anyway.

4) Remove the memory stick from the old machine and put it into the NB200. '
Reboot.
Hit F12
Choose USB
It should boot into Norton. The first memory stick I tried didn't work - gave a corrupt file warning. The second one worked, an old 512MB I got free.


If so, plug in the USB HD with the backup.

The next part is not for the faint of heart. You will be erasing the hard drive on the NB200, then restoring from the backup.

If you are nervous, try restoring the backup you just made to the C drive. This will also make sure the backup is OK.

Now, if you are confident, then let's move on.

We will be using almost the same sequence we used to erase and format the memory stick, except this time on the NB200 hard drive.

Open a command line from Norton on the NB. (Remember we just booted from the Memory stick right?)

• Run the diskpart command line app. (Type: diskpart)

Enter the rest one after the other:

• list disk, to find the drive number of your NB200 hard drive (mine was 0).
• select disk #, to select the NB200 disk (put the number you found in the previous step in place of the # – be absolutely certain you have the right number!)
• clean - This wipes the hard drive!!
  
• create partition primary
• select partition 1
• active
• format fs=NTFS QUICK Volume="MyVolumeName"
  
• assign
• exit

There, you've done it. Erased all the partitions on the NB drive, and made a new big one.

Plug in the USB Hard Drive with the Ghost backup.

Now, go back to Norton and restore the C drive backup. Note, it will complain that the restore points are no longer there, but you can select the actual backup file on your USB Hard Drive. I forget the actual sequence, but it isn't hard to find. Then watch it as it copies the data into the new bigger C partition.

Reboot, and enjoy your new big partition with more space available. (149GB Free!)