It was like an IQ test, or FreeCell. Shoving stuff about as space became ready.
Rules. No messing with C and no use of a third party's product like Partition Magic.
Just in case anyone finds it interesting, I'll go over it more to clarify the technique in my own mind.
I can't quite remember the sequence, but at one stage I seemed to be bulked at every turn. But some considerable number of folders and data did survive.
The question is, does the data actually get rewritten . . . or just update whatever NTFS has as a file system?
On disk manager, the drives are displayed from left to right. I'll refer to the left as First, progressing to the right.
1/ System 100Mb
2/ OS 100Gb
3/ Unallocated >100Gb
4/ Primary partition >100Gb
5/ Logical drive Green boarder >100Gb
C was to stay clean, having done a full format and system load. So, no dumping data there.
ie At this stage I had new Windows 7 on C, the remainder of C that I had relinquished - as I reduced the size of C - came next. It was marked as unallocated.
Okay, thinks I, I'll have four logical drives...that'll do.
The problem was that the 100mb System section at the 'front' or First, seemed to count as a partition, so when I tried to make a drive in the Unallocated part, I was bulked by a warning that I was trying to create too many partitions.
I know the limit is 4, but there seemed to be no way to just make 'logical' drives as opposed to Primary Partitions. As mentioned, it had given me one already, but that just happened. So many options were greyed out.
So, I copied a few gig of data from 4 to the last drive: 5.
Finally, after some angst, I dispensed with 4 so that it would join the unallocated void.
Then I'm not sure. I think I made a drive in the 'void' of a size I wanted. This way, 5 could be allowed to be extended Downwards. Anyway, when I'd created this, I put all the date in it. By some means I used the remaining Unallocated to make the last drive bigger.
Then I put some of the data back into what had become E, leaving a bit in D. It was about now that I noticed a few gig missing.
As a by the way: Each time I created a drive, I did a quick format.