Win7 Removal of Partitioning

I just did an Update Install of Win7 over Vista. I previously had a Dual Boot configuration with XP installed first, and then Vista, in equal Partitions on my 320 GB hard drive. I was able to finish the Update Install of Win7 and then used EasyBCD to remove the XP selection from the Boot Directory. No problem. Win7 starts and runs fine. The problem now is I am unable to Expand the C: drive to include the now empty other half of the HD. When I go through the menu items, or just Right Click the C: drive, the Expand cmd is grayed out. I have a feeling this has something to do with the fact that XP had been installed first, originally. Then Vista was installed. And even though Vista Boot Directory takes control of the Boot-up, XP retained control of other functions within both programs, including all Permissions. I was never allowed access to the Documents and Settings folder while in Vista. Apparently, even though I am the sole user of this machine, and I am its ONLY Administrator, Win7 inherited its Permissions from Vista. Attempts to change this in Normal Mode have failed. I presume I will need to reboot into Safe Mode and do something there? Or is there something else I can do to allow the C: drive to Expand to the entire HD? Would GParted override the permissions?

 

If your talking about the recovery partition, you cant expand it to the C:
if not here:

1. Click Start, click All Programs, click Accessories, right-click Command Prompt, and then click Run as administrator.
2. In the elevated command prompt, type diskpart and press Enter.
3. In the elevated command prompt, type list disk and press Enter.
*********This is to help you ID the disk that has Free space that you want to extend.
4. In the elevated command prompt, type select volume [volume number] and press Enter.
5. When the right disk and partitions were selected, perform the extend command. If you don't specify the size to extend by, then the command will extend the partition by using all of the contiguous space available on that disk.

This will extend the partition 500Mb

 

If you're partitions look like this:
|recovery|MBR|what was XP|Windows 7|

Then you won't be able to expand the C: of Win7, but only to the right. Free space to the left cannot be incorporated into partitions further in the disc. It's risky, but you can try software to move the partition to the left and then expand to take up the new free space to the right. Definitely backup your data first.

Look for Ultimate Boot CD or Parted Magic. They should be able to help you move your partition over to the left.

 

Here are my results:

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7600]
Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\Windows\system32>diskpart

Microsoft DiskPart version 6.1.7600
Copyright (C) 1999-2008 Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: LARRYSBEAST

DISKPART> list disk

Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ------------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 Online 298 GB 0 B
Disk 1 No Media 0 B 0 B

DISKPART> list volume

Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info
---------- --- ----------- ----- ---------- ------- --------- --------
Volume 0 E DVD-ROM 0 B No Media
Volume 1 D New Volume NTFS Partition 149 GB Healthy
Volume 2 C NTFS Partition 149 GB Healthy System
Volume 3 F Removable 0 B No Media

DISKPART> select volume 2

Volume 2 is the selected volume.

DISKPART> extend

Virtual Disk Service error:
The size of the extent is less than the minimum.


DISKPART>
C:\Windows\system32>

C:\Windows\system32>

C:\Windows\system32>

C:\Windows\system32>

OK, what now?

 

The only Partitions I can see are the C: & D: Partitions. No other partitions are listed on this HD in either DISKPART (see post above), or in the Disk Manager.

What do I do now?

 

Can you provide me a screenshot of Disk Manager in Windows 7? I'd like to see the location of the partitions.

Running out for a a few hours today, but will get back to you this evening.

 

Here it is:

 

Simply delete the second partition (you can do this in disc management), then you can expand your other one (can be done in disc management also).

Michael

 

Simply deleting the D:\ partition would work. There are two problems though. You cannont expand a partition from right to left. So, the OS partition (C:\) cannot be expanded to take over the unallocated space once D:\ is removed. And... keeping C:\ to the right places the OS toward the center of the HDD, which has the slowest read/write rates.

You've got 2 options, in my limited knowledge. Remove your user data to an external drive and completely reinstall your OS and let it reformat the HDD. You can specificy the partition size of C:\ (which is a very good idea) and create a D:\ during installation as well. This will put the OS partition on the outside of the HDD where it spins faster and the read/write rates are at their best. The other option is to boot a program called Parted Magic (you can get it from the Ultimate Boot CD {google it}). In Parted Magic, you can move a partition to a different part of the physical disc. It does come with risks of not working, so backup your data first.

Thanks again for the image. Everything makes perfect sense with it. Your boot/load times will improve when you get your OS partition on the left side.

 

The second one is his c: drive, you dont want to so that.

 

That would be a bad thing, yes. How about if I copy the C: drive to the D: drive, make it the boot drive and then rename the drives. Would that work?

 

Now that might be a thought, but it's not as simple as copying. There are things that do not copy over. The MBR (master boot record) is still going to look in the wrong place, I think.

Do you have a 2nd drive for backups and data transfer? You're going to need one for whichever solution you get to work.

I still think your best bet is to move your user data from the HDD and then reinstall Windows properly, like I mentioned before.

You may be able to play with system images, but you'll still need a 2nd HDD for that to work. You chould make an image of the recovery/mbr/OS partitions, leaving out d:, then restore that image back to the drive and see if it butts c: all the way to the left.

Again, look into Parted Magic to delete d: and then move c: further out on the HDD. You'll still need a backup HDD as it's plain unwise to mess with moving data/partitions and not having a failsafe somewhere.

Your situation is fixable, but it's not as easy as click and move, unless you don't mind risking your data.

 

Yes, I discovered that. I copied the C: drive and it was only going to paste about 32GB out of the 70+GB on the drive. Is there a program that will do an exact copy of one drive to another? How about Ghost? Other programs? I think I will be OK if I can get an exact copy on the D: drive because I have "EasyBCD", so I can re-set the computer to boot from either drive. Once I boot into the D: drive, it will become the C: drive, and the current C: drive will be the new D: drive. Then I should be able to erase the new D: drive and extend the C: drive, right? The C: drive would then be to the left of the D: drive, instead of to the right like it now is. I think this may be my easiest solution, IF I can get an EXACT copy of the current C: drive made to the D: drive. What do you think of it?

I have a Verbatim 750 GB External drive that is only one-quarter full. So it has plenty of room left.

If I do that, then I lose the settings that the Update Install transferred from Vista because that would be a Clean Install, right?

I may have to go this route if the idea I mentioned above doesn't work.

 

I don't know about Ghost or anything like that. Perhaps it can make an image of c: and then write it to d:?

Now that I know you've got a backup HDD, you're pretty much risk free and can try any method in trial and error to see which one will work. If one method doesn't, you can just reimage and try another method. I'd say make the backup image and go straight to trying out Parted Magic. It's probably the easiest.

 

I am currently in the process of making the Parted Magic CD. One of the things it says it can do is clone drives, so I will try that first. After I make the back-up. The Verbatim drive came with Nero Back-up.

 

I don't think it clones the way you think it will. I'll clone your drive and overwrite whatever is on your external drive. Use Windows Backup & Restore to make a system image.

 

I've done the back-up image using Nero Back-up to the external drive. It appears to have gotten everything as the size of the back-up exactly matches the size on the C: drive. I will read up on the cloning program in Parted Magic before I use it. I was planning to clone the C: drive directly to the D: drive. Evidently the D: drive needs a full re-format as Nero Back-up could still see some 89GB of data on it, which was the size of the XP Partition. Parted Magic also has disk wipe programs on it to totally erase data.

The program Parted Magic uses for cloning is Clonezilla.