I recently set up Windows 8.1 on a new SSD (as GPT). While I'm aware that Windows automatically creates its necessary extra small partitions for recovery, I just realized that my secondary HDD which I also formatted as GPT has these extra partitions. This secondary HDD was the one shipped on my laptop that used to have Win 8 preinstalled so maybe its remnants of that.
My question is (and I hope this is the right forum to ask): Are those partitions only necessary if the said hard drive contains the OS? In other words, can I delete them since this is a secondary drive?
I just bought a new laptop - an ASUS N550JV - with a single 1TB hard drive. I specifically sought a 1TB hard drive because I intend to store a lot of photos on the laptop and already have over 600GB of photo data to store.
When I got the laptop the first thing I did was to go through the windows update process to get everything up to date, then I upgraded to Windows 8.1 (the laptop came with Windows 8), then I ran the windows update again until everything was up to date.
It was only then that I opened up file explorer with the intention of setting up a basic folder structure for the files I planned to transfer to the laptop. I was dissapointed, at that point, to discover that instead of a single 1TB C: drive, I saw a 370+ GB C: drive and a 530GB + D drive. I confirmed with system information that there is indead just a single drive, and that it thus came partitioned into 2 primary volumes (which, btw, still don't add up to 1TB BTW!). This setup really doesn't work for me, because the "larger" volume is still too small for all my photos, and it would be illogical and inconvenient to have to split up the photos so that some were on the C drive and some on the D drive.
Could I somehow merge the two partitions back into one primary drive, or at least re-size them so that the D drive had at least, say, 750GB, and shrink the C drive accordingly. He pointed me to the Disk Management utility and directed me to delete the (still empty) D drive, which would make that storage space unallocated, then extend the C drive to use that unalocated space. I was able to delete the D drive, and confirmed that there was now 530+ GB of unallocated space. However, when I click on the C drive the option to extend is greyed out.
I did a bit of Googling at this point and discovered that you can can only extend to contiguous unallocated space, and the unallocated space was NOT contiguous - there is a 350MB "Recovery Partition" between the C and D (or unallocated) spaces. In fact, there were multiple recovery and other partitions. (From left to right: 100MB "EFI System Partition", 900MB "Recovery Partition", 370+GB "Primary" C Drive with Boot etc, 350MB "Recovery Partition", 530+GB "Primary" D drive, and 20+GB "Recovery Partition").
Of course I would be too scared to delete the recovery partition, but there's no option to do so anyway ...
I asked the family member again and he suggested creating a USB Recovery Drive and, in the process, wipe the recovery partition. So used the windows utility to create a recovery drive, and sure enough, at the end it asked if I wanted to delete the recovery partition and I said yes. The good news is that this removed the 20GB partition, and I was able to extend the D drive to use that newly unallocated space. The bad news is that the 350MB recovery partition still lies between the C and D drives, preventing me from merging the two.
Again through Googling I found that there are tools I could use to force delete the recovery partition, but I'm afraid to do so and kill my computer or recovery options all together. I also heard that this 350MB recovery partition was created when I upgraded to 8.1, and that rolling back to my factory setting won't remove the partition?
So the question is, what can I do? Is there an easy way to "move" the recovery partition to the end of the drive without breaking any functionality that it might have? What would happen to my computer if this recovery partition were to "break" or get removed? Is it best that I just "live with it" the way it is despite the inconvenience?
Recently I got my new laptop running under Windows 8.1 and was surprised with how the partitions were sized.
Here is the screenshot from the DiskManagement:
So I shrank the size of C: disk as you can see and got unallocated space. I want to attach that space to D: disk. I thought that is possible to extend recovery partition to unallocated space, then shrank recovery partition, and newly appeared unallocated then attach to D:/ disk. But failed with that.
I don't think that I really need those 900Mb and 350Mb recovery partitions and that they are useful, but it would be unwise to delete them while I don't know what are they for. Latter 20Gb recovery partition at the picture at least has the significant size to store something
See, my little brother accidentally formatted an encrypted partition of my HDD (Disk drive D: 100 GB to be exact) which contained really important data that I need back! It had all of my photographs from the past 5 years (which I was too lazy to back up on cloud storage).
Would this recover the lost data? I do have the password and the recovery key. I hope this works...
As the title states, I'm switching back from Mac to PC. I have all of my precious photos (I love photography in particular) and music stored on an external hard drive (iomega), but it's been formatted for Mac OS. I read that you can't transfer from a Mac OS formatted drive to a PC.
Telling me to reformat the ext. hdd to fat32 isn't going to work, because first of all, that would delete the valuable data, and fat32 only allows the transfer of files less than 4GB.
How I can transfer all of my data on my Mac OS X-formatted external drive to my new Windows PC. It is absolutely essential.
OK, so I made a backup DVD of some OS related programs for my computers onto a DVD, but when I attempted to MOUNT the image from the disk to Win 8.1's included virtual drive, I get an error that the Disc Image is not formatted for NTFS file system, and cannot be mounted.
I can copy the files from the disc to a location on the desktop and execute the files from there, but it's a royal pain in the neck to do this every time.
(Yes, I understand, I probably will need to build a new image and burn it to a new DVD, but I want to make it one that I can run the disc from my optical drive and it will work!).
USB is volatile storage, and can be erased. I prefer hardcopy backups for this reason.
For some odd reason my laptop decided to not boot into windows anymore; It would be stuck "boot looping" with my MSI laptop logo and a loading sign (rotating circle). I had Kali Linux and Windows 8 installed on the laptop and neither one would work. So I formatted the entire HDD with all 3 partitions, windows partition, even my storage, and kali's partition because the automatic repair wouldn't work as well; it'll be stuck on Preparing automatic repair and wouldn't get past that screen. I have formatted my HDD with my other windows 7 machine by just right clicking -> format.
I have downloaded a torrented version of Win 8 iso (just for the purposes of installation, my laptop came with a Serial # and I have purchased an product key only version as well). I have burned a DVD of win 8 via winISO and changed my boot options to boot from DVD as well.
Now my problem is, when I am prompted to press any key to boot from CD/DVD and I press a key I am redirected to Preparing Automatic Repair and back to square one of my problems. I believe the recovery/backup partition is still on there.
I have tried being in both LEGACY and UIEF. UIEF sends me to Preparing Repair and LEGACY takes me to the windows 8 logo with the rotating circle underneath with nothing after that (not sure if it takes a VERY long time or not)
I built myself a new system and I am now on my third clean install of Windows 9 Pro. The first installation was nixed due to faulty programs and the second by faulty hardware. This installation seems to be fine, at least my event log is not showing any significant errors. I really don't won't to do another clean install so the question I have is:
Can I install Windows with UEFI without reinstalling on a new hard drive formatted as GPT?
I bought a brand new Acer Aspire xc600 today and it had Windows 8 installed. First thing me and my husband did was to try to install win7 (as we dislike Windows 8 for many reasons)... When it didnt work with just putting in the cd and install, we (stupidly without making recovery discs as we thought we would never need it) formated the drive and made it completely clean before installing win7 (which works now). This means we have no Windows 8 recovery disc or E-recovery management program and therefor cant do factory reset and return this piece of crap pc... (We play world of warcraft and my 7year old pc has only been updated once when it comes to graphic card to geforce 9800 and still perform better outside the game).
The performance test of the whole system give the graphics a lousy 5.0 which is worse than my husbands 3yr old graphic card as well! Only numbers that have increased is the RAM and CPU.
I feel disappointed as the graphics card should be better than mine or my husbands and have better performance even if its the "laptop sized card".
So to the issue, is there a way we could restore/reinstall the computer to factory settings with Windows 8 and Acers drivers as it was when we started it up earlier today?
From many days i was trying to make backup but i was not able to make than i found that my Master File Table it corrupt which located in System Reserved.
Than i thought of Re-Installing Windows than i Formatted System Reserved Drive & My C Drive.Now I am not even able to Install Windows.
Error Shown by the Windows Setup - Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition.
I used AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard to add a NTFS Partition to my USB drive. I want to store large files over 4GB on this partition, while having the rest of my files on the primary partition which is FAT32. The problem is, when I plug my drive into the computer it only shows the primary partition.
Is there any way to get Windows to show both partitions when I plug the device in? I want to be able to store files on both partitions.
After doing some research, I found that one possible way would be to set the USB device as a "Fixed disk". I was unable to figure out how to do this.
The device is a 32GB Silicon Power Blaze Removable Disk with USB 3.0.
I have win 8 pro installed & two HDDs with two partions each , I want to migrate the boot partition to another partition on the second drive .
It would have been easier if i would have just cloned the complete drives but one of the partions on the 2nd drive has data which cannot be deleted .
So I have Drive
1 - Partitions C: ( boot partition ) & D:
Drive 2 - Partitions E: & F:
I want to remove Drive 1 from my PC so i want to copy C: to E: then remove drive 1 & boot from E:
I tried "Easeus todo backup" , did not work, it does not make the copy bootable , to make it bootale the whole drive has to be copied .
I tried making an image of C: using Windows 8 inbuilt backup feature then removed drive 1 , installed Windows 8 on E: then tried restoring the image of C: but i got some error.
I would like to add a partition to a drive having the following partitions:
Number Partition Size 1 Windows RE 499 MB 2 EFI System 300 MB 3 MSR 128 MB 4 C: 216 GB 5 Windows RE 450 MB 6 Samsung Image 19 GB 7 Samsung Recovery 1 GB
This should be easy to do with MiniTool Partition Wizard. In essence, resize "C:", add the partition in the unallocated space, assign the drive letter "D" to the new partition, and format it to NTFS.
You will notice that the drive has two Windows RE partitions. This is because I updated to Windows 8.1 from Windows 8 through the Microsoft Store.
I used to have System Reserved on separate partion to C: but on my last fresh re-install, I decided to make C: and System Reserved in one partition. Here's what shows on Disk Management:
My question is, which is better. System Reserved on the same partition with C: or on a separate partition?
Suddenly, the Acronis program I used to always use for partition copy, won't detect my USB mouse and KB. So, I'm having to do it with Partition Wizard 7. I've never used that to move a system partition, are there any issues doing it that way? The only other program I used to use for this kind of Op is paragon partition manager, which the version I have is not compatible with 8.
I don't like doing it this way, it's very slow compared to using the Acronis program, which seems to fly fast.
I want to create a second primary partition on my first harddisk(disk 0 look at picture)
from the free space there in the extended partition(view screenshot). Now my problem is that whenever I want to create a new partition by right clicking and selecting "New Simple Volume" and selecting the formatting etc, I get another logical drive in the extended partition(look at picture below).
Is is not what I want. I want to move that free space out from the extended partition and add the unallocated 9 MB to it and then create a second primary partition on disk 0.
Note: If its possible I want to do this without using any third party software, IF POSSIBLE.
This is my basic spread prime contains a win 7 installation(active) halo contains a win 8 installation(boot) and is a logical partition What I need to do is: format prime and combine it with halo , this will be my boot and active keep logic and halo as it is an my logical drives I cannot lose data in halo or logic. how do I go about doing this ..
On my Desktop I have one 240GB HD (C:) with XP Home installed and various other programs. I also have 2 other IDE HD of 80GB (D:) and 40GB (E:) which I use to store my backups and other Utilities. I plan to buy Windows 8.1 and install it on this Desktop but I wonder which will be the best option. I would also like if possible to be able to dual boot between the OSs
One is to make an image of the XP Home and then re install it on the 80GB hard disk, then install the 8.1 on the SATA HD. Here I don't know when I install XP on the D: hard disk if the new image will make the changes to all programs from the C: to D:
The other option is to use GPARTED LiveCD and shrink the SATA hard disk to allow me to make 2 partitions. Here I don't know if it is a good idea to have two OS on the same HD but on different partitions.What is your opinion on the above and perhaps there are other better ways?
I try to add more than four partitions in win 8, but I couldn't then I install win xp as a dual with win 8, after that I add fifth partition through win xp. Next I log in to win 8 then I saw that there are only 4 partitions with the new one, and one of the old partitions which had a tera of files appeared as an unallocated partition.
Let me start off by posting a screenshot of my disk management section on control panel for reference latter on.
So the 1TB HDD (Disk 0) is were i'm having trouble, the 128GB SSD (Disk 1) is fine. As you can see, there are three different F partitions of various sizes that combine to form one single readable drive. Also, the disk is dynamic and all volumes have the yellow banner on them vs the blue like on the SSD.
Its kinda irrelevant how I got to this situation, but in a nutshell I (by mistake) put the system reserved on the HDD and on trying to remove it this happened. The third partition is a result of me trying to fix it. My wish is to get it to just one single basic partition that takes up the whole drive. Also, the drive is where I store all of my games so loosing its data is complete out of the question. I do have a external harddrive, but I doubt it could fit the contents of my games without crazy amounts of compression.
So recently my windows 7's some system files got corrupt . won't start after windows logo (when the arrow shows up=>always bsod, even in safemode). so I decided to format C and install fresh windows 8.
Then I had four partitions C:windows(7) D:Softwares E:Games F:Mix Stuff.
My plan was to format C (of course for windows 8) and D (as C had only 20Gb space so I thought I would also format D 46Gb and give C 45Gb and D 20-21Gb as it was useless to me and contained only a bunch of crappy softwares ). Well, it FAILED here's how. after formatting C and D I deleted them thinking that boths unallocated space will merge. but it DID'NT.
After deleting I tried creating new partition on D but it FAILED "we cannot create create new partition" . Then I did same thing with C and it WORKED. I had to give it again 20Gb (maximum) - NO CHOICE. Then I installed Windows 8 on C. (thinking I will later format D on desktop)
Now here's the scenario : I DO NOT WANT TO FORMAT E: AND F: AS IT CONTAINS MY PRECIOUS DATA. After the startup config, 'Startup' came up I went to Desktop then Computer and then what????
WHERE THE HELL ARE OTHER PARTITIONS???????? Only C: I found there 7.67Gb free of 19.5GB. Where are others gone .
I went to disk management and saw only (C:) other 138Gb (something) was unallocated space. Then I booted my pc from windows installation usb and on the drive screen I saw C 19.5-20Gb and Unallocated space 138Gb.
I bought a new 2 tb hard drive and I am going to transfer the windows 8 partitions to the new drive when I get it. How can I do this ? My soon to be old drive is 500 gb . What about using hard drive cloning softwares ? Do imaging softwares work ?
I've got a laptop with two NTFS partitions on it; one for Windows 8, and another for storage of random things. Both are NTFS-formatted, and they're on a basic disk.
The problem is: When I open the "Computer" window, it only shows me the C: drive that I'm running Windows from. Other things are there... the DVD-RW, network folders, other computers on the net, etc. But the H: drive (the other NTFS partition I use for random storage) isn't there. HOWEVER..... if I go up to the address bar and type in "H:" and hit <Enter>, it takes me to that drive, and the H: drive suddenly appears in the folder-pane on the left of the window.
It does the same thing for any USB drives I plug in. I can type their drive letters into the address bar, and then it'll take me to that drive and it's icon will show up in the left-hand folder pane. But then, when I navigate away from that drive, it disappears again.
It's like Windows is hiding them from me unless I know the address, kinda like how putting "$" at the end of a shared folder name does it with network shares.
Purchased a new laptop . It has one large C 1T drive . I would like to create 4 primary partitions , one for programs, one for data , another for media , and the rest unallocated.
How to use built in disk manager ? Can I create several partitions at one go?
Is it easier to use a 3rd party partition software?
recently my windows 7's some system files got corrupt . won't start after windows logo (when the arrow shows up=>always bsod, even in safemode). so I decided to format C and install fresh windows 8. . Then I had four partitions
C:windows(7) D:Softwares E:Games F:Mix Stuff.
My plan was to format C (of course for windows 8) and D (as C had only 20Gb space so I thought I would also format D 46Gb and give C 45Gb and D 20-21Gb as it was useless to me and contained only a bunch of crappy softwares ). Well, it FAILED here's how. after formatting C and D I deleted them thinking that boths unallocated space will merge. but it DID'NT. After deleting I tried creating new partition on D but it FAILED "we cannot create create new partition" (search google 'cause others also sometimes have this ****** error many times). Then I did same thing with C and it WORKED. I had to give it again 20Gb (maximum) - NO CHOICE. Then I installed Windows 8 on C. (thinking I will later format D on desktop) . Now here's the scenario : I DO NOT WANT TO FORMAT E: AND F: AS IT CONTAINS MY PRECIOUS DATA.
After the startup config, 'Startup' came up I went to Desktop then Computer and then wow what?
Only C: I found there 7.67Gb free of 19.5GB. Where are others gone .
UPDATE :. I went to disk management and saw only (C:) other 138Gb (something) was unallocated space .Then just for checking I booted my pc from windows installation usb and on the drive screen I saw C 19.5-20Gb and same Unallocated space 138Gb.
First Of all You Need To Open Control Panel Then Go to System Security-Administrative Tools Then Computer Management
In Second Step You need To Open Storage And Then Disk Management
In Third Step . Now you need a partition which will be added to the targeted one (E: drive will be added to D:). The drive which will be added to another, should be back-up before this major change on disk partitions.
So be Sure that You Done Backup Files Then Delete the Partition Then After Getting a Free Space Partition,Move To partition (D Drive) Which Will Be Extended and right-click on it. Select the Extend Volume and go Next.
Select Next From the Bottom Side And Then It will take a Few Minutes To Merge Two partition Into Single Drive.
I'm mostly a Linux user, but I recently bought a laptop with Windows 8 on it. After a few days dual booting I decided it wasn't for me, so I decided to delete the windows partitions and usa just Linux. I would like, however, to keep the recovery partition, so to be able to easily reinstall Windows again if I felt like I needed to, but I'm not sure what partitions should I keep. Here's a picture of my hard drive partitions as of now:
Do I need more than the restore partition? Can I get rid of the boot one? What about the recovery one? And the one flagged msftres?