Windows 7 - Changing the partitions of hard drive?

Cianos

Hey,
A while back I botched up a partitioning of my 200gb hard drive so now I have one 70gb drive and a 50gb drive. I dont know where that last 80gb went! I don't store a lot of things on my computer so space was never an issue.

I have just installed Windows 7 and while doing so thought I may as well try sort this out now.

Can anyone tell me please how I may repartition the drives without losing any of the data and having to reinstall Windows 7 again etc?

Any help would be very appreciated.

P.S - When I installed Windows 7 it told me that it's keeping all the Vista files in a folder as a precaution. Is it really necessary to keep all this stuff, and if not how would I go about deleting it to free up more space?

Thanks

Ricky91t

Cianos wrote: »

Hey,
A while back I botched up a partitioning of my 200gb hard drive so now I have one 70gb drive and a 50gb drive. I dont know where that last 80gb went! I don't store a lot of things on my computer so space was never an issue.

I have just installed Windows 7 and while doing so thought I may as well try sort this out now.

Can anyone tell me please how I may repartition the drives without losing any of the data and having to reinstall Windows 7 again etc?

Any help would be very appreciated.

P.S - When I installed Windows 7 it told me that it's keeping all the Vista files in a folder as a precaution. Is it really necessary to keep all this stuff, and if not how would I go about deleting it to free up more space?

Thanks

Right,
First of all right click my computer and click "Manage" click yes if the UAC window pops up and then click disk management,You should see a grey area totalling to around 80gb,Right clicking this will give you options,I think you could either make a new partition out of this or extend your primary or secondary partition,It's your choice really,If you have any issues(or no one else replies)could you post a screen capture of the disk manager screen so I can see if it's there etc..

Deleting the Vista thing is recommended,I have over 20gb of data which was mostly crap,Add to that my old vista install and it took up quite alot,If you're happy with 7 and have transferred or backed up data you'll see a file called "Windows Old" or something near that!(Sorry it was weeks ago when I did this!!)

This should give you some free hard disk space

Cianos

Ricky91t wrote: »

Right,
First of all right click my computer and click "Manage" click yes if the UAC window pops up and then click disk management,You should see a grey area totalling to around 80gb,Right clicking this will give you options,I think you could either make a new partition out of this or extend your primary or secondary partition,It's your choice really,If you have any issues(or no one else replies)could you post a screen capture of the disk manager screen so I can see if it's there etc..

Cheers for the reply. I went in to disk management, and attempted to expand the C drive. Right clicking it didn't give me this option, as "extend volume" is greyed out. Even though in the screenshot you can see that there's 70gb of unallocated space. I turned that in to a drive, shrunk said drive, and even still can't extend the C drive. So I'm not sure what to do now.

MjM

You'll have to add it to your drive The layout in the image is similar to your disk and the unused space may not be physically next to the C: partition.

Cianos

MjM wrote: »

You'll have to add it to your drive The layout in the image is similar to your disk and the unused space may not be physically next to the C: partition.

Ah ok, interesting that that's how it works. So if I want to have a bigger C drive I'll have to delete everything but the C drive and work from there I'm guessing.

So the D volume is the volume I was using on Vista to store my Windows Image Backup. I went to delete it just there but was warned that the drive is in use and deleting it may cause unexpected problems. Is it still ok to go ahead with that?

Thanks

Cianos

Cianos wrote: »

Ah ok, interesting that that's how it works. So if I want to have a bigger C drive I'll have to delete everything but the C drive and work from there I'm guessing.

So the D volume is the volume I was using on Vista to store my Windows Image Backup. I went to delete it just there but was warned that the drive is in use and deleting it may cause unexpected problems. Is it still ok to go ahead with that?

Thanks

Just wanted to bump this to hopefully get some advice on the above, because I kinda need to do this asap.

cheers

tman

Depends on what files are actually on the drive - if it's just a backup image then clicking yes should be fine

To be honest you're much better off having a seperate partition, just save all of your files there and if you ever have to reinstall windows, you can just wipe the C: drive without worrying about losing files...

Cianos

tman wrote: »

Depends on what files are actually on the drive - if it's just a backup image then clicking yes should be fine

To be honest you're much better off having a seperate partition, just save all of your files there and if you ever have to reinstall windows, you can just wipe the C: drive without worrying about losing files...

Thanks. I deleted the drive and it doesn't seem to have caused any problems. I'm creating a new D drive on which I want to store a saved image of Windows, to make it easy to start afresh should I want to in the future. (Hoping it doesn't seem necessary as often as it did on Vista.)