I have dual-booted Windows 8.1 and Windows 7. I have managed to free up a significant amount of space on Windows 7 and was wondering if it's possible to add some of the freed space to my Windows 8.1 partition?
If pic won't resize, cope and paste: "[URL] ....."
which partition holds Windows 8 on my Dual Boot 7/8 system. I want to delete Windows 8 64 bit and reinstall Windows 8 32 bit, then update to Windows 8.1. I'm doing this because the system's old enough that 64 bit 8.1 won't install but maybe 32 bit will. I won't know unless I try.
I need to figure out which partition Windows 8 is on so I can format the drive and reinstall.
I have made my Windows 8.1 DVD, but I haven't committed to installing it yet.
I'd like to just install it on a separate partition on my second hard drive.
Normally I wouldn't hesitate to just go ahead and install it, but I'm not sure if the new Uefi bios will just except it and automatically set up the dual boot menus etc, the way that it did in the past.
Are there extra steps that I need to take before going ahead with the install.
I definitely don't want to replace my current Windows 8 install until the final version comes online at that time I will probably do a complete new install of all my software.
Dual install without using VM?
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 dual-booted Vista and Win 8. I created a small ~20GB partition where I have my Windows 8 Release Preview. Now I really like it, because Vista is really slow compared to any other OS. Windows 8 is blazing fast, but I have programs on my Vista partition. I make music so I use Ableton Live for that. When I tried to launch Ableton in Windows 8 by browsing through the Vista partition, it wants to install itself and authorize again. If I was on Windows 7 64-bit I would use the Laplink PCMover but I am on Vista 32-bit. Is there a way I could transfer my programs to Windows 8? (They're all 32-bit if it matters...) Like use some backup & restore thing or anything??
View 6 Replies View RelatedSo recently i bought a refurbished/used Samsung ultrabook (NP540U3C-A01UB )
One of the features is that is has : (500GB with 24GB ExpressCache - Technology)
Which I don really understand.
I've also noticed that the system has a lot of partitions that are taking space and are largely unused. I've had the computer for about a month and i use it everyday almost and so far a lot of the partitions havent been used.
I don't see a reason why to have those.
So can i Erase them??
Please notice 2 disks. I know the larger one is used for C: and the other for the ExpressCache???
Also notice that disk1 is empty. Pretty much all of them are, with the exception of 2 (C: and the partition right of it)
What is it used for?? How can i find out?? Whoever installed this system made a mess.
Here is a second part of my question:
For work reasons I have to have a Ubuntu machine and I thought I could just dualboot and use the partitions that are unused. Which is why i care about the unused space.
I have used virtualbox in the past but it was really slow. I need a responsive system and virtualization is no longer an option.
So my question would be how can i accomplish the dualbooting?? Specially taken that i have UEFI/random partitions in my system.
I know there are a lot of tutorials out there but none come close to my drive mapping/situation.
Just don't wanna destroy my system while trying to get the dualboot working.
I just found out that some of space in one of my partition is occupied by NO file after I updated my Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 via MS Store. There is no file hidden in the partition but the computer shows me that 3GB of a partition in my second hard drive are being used.
What I did on my computer before I updated Windows 8 were:
1. Recovered my PC to the factory state
2. Formatted all partitions in both hard drives (the primary one has 3 partitions, not including those Windows hidden partitions, and the second one has 4 partitions).
3. Updated my Windows 8
4. Went through the setup screens
Then I found that 3GB of a partition in the second drive is being used, but there is no file or hidden file there. Do you know what behind this usage???
I have a 200 gig partition on 1 drive that I have dedicated for games. But now it is filled, and even after shrinking my C drive to make space, I find that I still cannot extend my games partition. I've done a little reading and it appears that the issue is due to the free space not being directly beside the Games partition. I'm not sure, exactly, all I know is, I want to install more games and this technicality is preventing it.
Another thing that makes the situation more complex is that I have 2 other partitions on my drive that belong to Linux Mint. One is the main Mint partition, the other is a swap partition (similar to the page/swap file in Windows). I'm hesitant to try to mess around with moving those partitions since I'm not very experienced with Linux and if it doesnt boot I know I'll just reinstall it instead of trying to fix it. But I would like to avoid that in the first place.
I have tried with Disk Management, EaseUS, Paragon, Partition Wizard and GParted in Linux but they all wont let me make the games partition bigger, only smaller.
What I would like to do is to find a way to add free space to the Games partition, but without deleting other partitions or having to reinstall Linux. And more importantly, figuring out how to handle this kind of thing now so that I wont have issues extending partitions in the future. I also just figured I would say that I've converted the Games partition from primary to logical, due to the limitation of 4 primary partitions on a drive (maybe I'm wrong , but that's what I've heard). I say this because I recently had 4 primaries before trying to install Mint and Ubuntu, and neither of them would let me install. But as soon as I reduced to 3 primaries the issue went away and I was allowed to proceed. I figured that out after a bit of reading.
It is possible to move partitions on a disk so that they will be adjacent (either to the left or right) to another partition that needs to be extended?
I'm also posting a screenshot to make it easier for people to understand. The 36 gig partition is Linux's main partition, and the 15 gig partition to the right of it is Linux's swap partition. The pic also shows that both of those lie between the C drive and my games.
My K partition is of 24.3GB and says that only 3.80GB is free.
However in reality, the data inside is worth only 14.3GB which means 10GB should be free, not 3.80GB.
What could be the problem? I have attached the screenshot too.
Even though there are no hidden files in this partition, I enabled 'View Hidden Items'. And the size is indeed 14.3GB only. So I wonder where my remaining 6.20GB is going!
After installing Windows 8 on my main partition C, it is getting nearly full. So, I just have tried to merge some free space from Partition F in Disk Management. But, that doesn't work. Some people tell me that is because the free space is not adjacent to my C partition. I don't know whether it is right. I simply want to extend my C partition successfully.
View 6 Replies View RelatedI made two install of win 8 : one is enterprise , the second is pro with the free mc key and one of kubuntu that are well working . i used a drive with every os , with the others not connected to prevent errors and be more easy to select the one i want to boot .
By now I would like to clean my efi boot partitions because after testing ubuntu and removing it for kubuntu , I have two entry for them while one is no longer valid . I also would like to select between the two win8 without having to get in the bios . One thing that is weird with ebcd, it does not see my two windows 8, may be because they use the same loader name or file .
At last, how to turn win8 vga menu selector to the text one used by win7 . i ll be glad .
Here is a 4 x 1440 x 900 : [URL] ....
I'm trying to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8 (and then 8.1) on a laptop with a 240 GB SSD. When I run setup, it loads, but then says Windows can't be installed because there isn't enough free space on the system reserved partition. My reserved partition is only 32 MB (I believe it was shrunk from 100 MB when I swapped the SSD in).
Is there any way I can resize the reserved partition and install Windows 8, or will I need to totally reformat the drive and repartition? Don't want to reinstall all my software .....
I just got a refurbished ASUS K75DE laptop, and it came with Windows 8 on it. I am wanting to run a dual boot with Win7, so I disabled fast-boot just fine, and went into the UEFI BIOS and disabled the secure boot.
While I was there, I did like I have always done and set a BIOS boot-up password. I then proceed to boot to my Win7 installer USB Flash drive, but I was running low on battery power so I aborted the install and shut the computer down to try again later.
Now however when I get into BIOS to select boot priority, all options are grayed out except for system time and a few other non-essentials. At the bottom of the first BIOS screen it says "User Level : User" and I can't seem to find a way to reverse this issue. So now I'm stuck, can't boot to anything but the HDD because it is first by default.
I recently felt the urge to experiment with Linux and installed Ubuntu Mint and tried to set up dual booting.
However I seem to have only suceeded in preventing Windows booting at all. I cannot get into the recovery drive to undo my wrong doing.
How can I reset the windows boot manager without access to windows or recovery partitions?
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.
My Q200E Asus laptop came with 4g of memory. I would like to add another 4g's to bring it up to 8g's. I can find no instructions for doing this and am not entirely sure if it can be done. I have removed the back cover and see no memory sticks at all.
View 3 Replies View RelatedI have installed Blue 8.1 on a separate drive in my system along side 8.0. When I restart the 8.0 boots unless I manually select the 8.1 drive in bios. How can I alter the Boot menu to add the option to boot from either OS?
View 3 Replies View RelatedLate last Fall I bought a new Desktop, an HP H81414, with Windows 8 installed with the intention of installing Windows 7 on an SSD. I migrated Window 8 to an SSD, removed that from the system, installed new SSD and put Windows 7 on it. Both worked fine. I wound up with 2 SSD's. capable of running on the EFI BIOS machine with Secure Boot turned off. I later bought a new laptop with Windows 8. I found the Win 8 with Classic Shell to be very acceptable.
What I would like to do now ,if possible, is to mount both SSD's in the HP case and switch to either one of them at boot.
I had windows 7 running on my computer. When windows 8 came out I used a second harddrive as the windows 8 installation drive. Windows 8 automatically setup a dual boot system where every time I started the computer it took me a windows screen where I could select either windows 7 or windows 8. This has been going on since Windows 8 was released.
I decided it was getting old so I decided it was time to remove the old windows 7 harddrive. I tried doing it inside the windows 8 dual boot screen but could not find an option. So I decided to reformat the windows 7 harddrive. I did this in command prompt mode. After doing so when my computer restarted it said it could not find any harddrive to boot. Windows 8 is installed on the other harddrive, the one that was not reformatted. So how do I get it to start using that harddrive as the boot drive? I checked my bios and even physically disconnected the old HD that had windows 7 on it, but none of that seemed to work even though the Windows 8 HD is definitely in the boot order in the bios.
I am dual booting Windows 8 and win7. I actually have Windows 8 installed on its own hard drive and win 7 installed in its own hard drive. The win7 hard drive has been in use for the past 2 years and I have had Windows 8 running for about a week now. I purchased another hard drive for Windows 8 and left the old Win7 as it was.
I also have 3 other hard drives in the system. Everything is formatted NTFS.
So my system is as follows
Drive C - Boot Drive - I physically swap out the dedicated hard drive for Win 8 or Win 7
Drive D - internal 250 GB sata drive
Drive F - internal 250 GB sata drive
Drive H - internal 250 GB hard drive.
I have been running this config for about 2 years under Win7 with no problems.
The problem that I have now is when I swap the boot drive and boot up a different OS than last time (Like booting Windows 8, powering down system, swap boot drive, boot Win7) the system always says that there are problems on the 3 non-boot drives. It runs chkdsk(it least that is what it look like) and processes the 3 non boot disks one at a time which take about 10-12 minutes for all 3. Most of the time it finds no problems, but about 1 out of 5 boots will find a problem with one of the disks and then fixes it. The disks seem to be OK while I am running. I then power down and swap boot drive and reboot the other os and we start all over again. I am powering the system completely down for each reboot to make sure that the disk cache is flushed.So far the disk problems have been fixed by chkdsk at boot, but I am sure the day will come when the disk cannot be fixed and I will loose data.
How I can create a new hard drive without using space on the windows c: drive ...
View 9 Replies View RelatedI cloned my existing Windows installation (8.1 pro, 32 bit) onto my new SSD. I got everything up and running, and I still have my old Windows installation on one of the partitions of my HDD.
Can I turn this setup into a dual boot?
I think this could be useful, in case the new installation gets borked, or in order to run an effective malware scan on the SSD, etc.
I have windows 8 to go on my 320 GB USB harddrive and I would like to be able to boot from the disk a choose if I waht to boot from windows 8 to go or another partition where I have my ghost.
I'm not sure how to go about making a dual boot when it is a USB harddisk.
I have a Dell Inspiron 17, 5000 Series (1.7 GHz Intel Pentium 3558U, 4 GB Ram, 500 GB HDD). It came preloaded with Windows 8.1. I needed Windows 7 so I partitioned the main drive and installed Windows 7 in 100 GB of partitioned space. After swapping between the Windows 7 and 8 Boot manager. Ended up choosing the Windows 8 manager.
My problem comes in when I boot into Windows 7, then when I shut down and try and boot into Windows 8 it will hang prior to the boot manager (of Windows 8). I have to press and hold the power button to hard shut down. Once I do that and reboot, Windows 8 Boot manager and Windows 8 boot ok.
So Windows 8 will boot fine if I was last in Windows 8. However if I was last booted in Windows 7 then go to Windows 8 (or try and boot into 7 again, but using the 8 boot manager) it will hang at boot. I've used all the command checks with Windows 7 and 8. Found no errors. I can't reinstall Windows 8 as I don't have recovery disks, plus the computer came from Aarons Rent to Own (they had no issues me doing what I wish with it).
When I switch and use the Windows 7 boot manager I can boot back into Windows 7 even if Windows 7 was my last boot. But like when using the Windows 8 boot manager, I am unable to boot into Windows 8 if Windows 7 was booted last. But Can boot to Windows 8 if Windows 8 was booted last.
I have a computer running windows 7 now that has 5 drives (3x2TB and 2X3TB) that act as my home media storage center. I have TV shows split between 3 drives and movies on 2 drives. When I access these from other applications, it can be hard to group everything together and if I run out of space somewhere, it is a nightmare.
Win 8 pro x64 is on it's way, but wanted to know how to set up Storage Space. I have looked through the tutorials, but cannot figure out how to set my system up, if I have media in different spots.
Do I create 1 Storage Space and all 5 drives are in it then I just have to point to if from my other applications to get to the data? Do I create a storage space for each type of media (music, TV shows, Movies, etc.)? When I add a drive to a storage space, how do I get it to include the files within the storage space and not just use the "empty" drive space?
I am not looking for redundency protection, but to make my handling of data across all the drives easier (e.g. "Did I put my Futurama series on drive 1 or 2...Did South Park make it on to one drive or did I have to split it up?)
I have new pc that has windows 8 pro installed. I would like to dual boot with windows 7 because certain software for work is not compatible with win 8. I was reading that I can create a vhd from windows 8, boot to the windows 7 installation media and install win 7 to the vhd, then I have the option to select win 7 or 8. Am I missing something here or is it as easy as this? Also do I need Win 7 ultimate or will he professional one work? I do not want to partition the hard drive.
View 9 Replies View RelatedI set up a dual boot with Windows 7 and 8 and it is extremely slow up until the Windows 7 and 8 appear. From that point on both load quickly. Also under the Windows 7 icon it says "recovered". Otherwise eveerything seems to be functioning normally.
View 9 Replies View RelatedWell, I had a dual booted machine booting Windows 8 and Ubuntu.
Windows 8 was starting to play up so I decided to completely reset the computer. I backed everything up, booted to Windows 8 and hit the 'Reset PC' button.
After answering some questions (full erase, whole disc etc), it informed me that it was going to restart. I clicked accept.
Short Story:
- Corrupted Windows 8 partition
- Corrupted Windows 8 recovery partition
Long Story:
Instead of rebooting back to anything, I got left sitting at a grub rescue prompt. From there I told it to boot windows 8.
I then spent five minutes staring at the booting screen. Nothing happened.
I powered off and tried again, this time pointing grub rescue at the windows 8 recovery loader partition. Well, initially that looked like it worked. I got the nice metro UI, and chose 'reset this PC' It then informed me that the recovery partition was missing some files. The only other option was to shut down.
I tried booting just plain windows 8 again, but had the same problem as before (nothing happening), And now when I try to boot the recovery loader, Grub tells me the EFI file isn't where it expects it to be. (Interestingly, how are you meant to boot to this without having a non-windows bootloader?)
Additional Details: Computer: HP Envy M6-1206TX. Pre-installed with Windows 8. Bought about 1 month, 1 week ago.
The Questions:
Since windows 8 came pre-installed, I don't have a Windows 8 disc, are there any possibilities for me to get back windows 8? (other than contacting the store I purchased it from)
After going through the license agreement, my interpretation is that I still have a license for Windows 8, but I am not under their limited warranty (due to dual booting). I do not wish to buy another license, as I already have one.
One last question:
If you acquired the software on a disc or other physical media, your proof of license is the genuine. Microsoft certificate of authenticity label with the accompanying genuine product key.
Neither my laptop, nor the box, nor any of the paperwork provided in it had this 'certificate of authenticity.' I suppose that means I have no legal rights to the software. Who's fault is this, HP, Microsoft, or the store I bought it from?
I have previously posted about the recommended Windows OS for my new laptop... and Then I decided to install Windows 8.1 Pro alongside my previously installed Windows 7 Ultimate (32-bit)... Is it OK to install and dual-boot Windows 8.1 Pro with Windows 7 Ultimate?
And also tell me about the partition size allocations for both Windows, I have two partitions each of 24.7 GB for both the OSes, is this size worth applicable?
I have created dual boots before but in each case I did it the "usual" way by doing a fresh install of a second OS on a new drive (or new partition) and then letting the newest installation figure out how to arrange boot loaders or boot managers or whatever, i.e to figure out the dual boot parameters for me.
In this case I want to set up a dual boot using what is now 2 separate drives each with its own complete install of Windows. Of course, I can boot to one or the other by disconnecting the drive for the one I don't want to start up, but that is obviously a hassle.
Is there an easy way to set it up so that one of them (Win 8.1 pro) actually recognizes the other and asks me which one I want at boot up. I know if I re-install one of them I can do it, but I want to just set up the dual boot, and not touch either of the OS installations per se.
I have two hard drives One is a SSD and the other is a WD 64 MB cache 2 terabyte drive. I have Windows 7 installed on the SSD which works fine. I later, when I received it, installed Windows 8 on the other drive for a dual boot. It works, the screen comes up allowing me to choose between the OS's. Like I said picking 7 works fine but when I go into 8 it boots up, shows the Metro and is locked solid. I havent waited more than 5 mins but i get tired of it locking. I have 16 gigs of Kingston Ram, 2 ATI 6950 with combined 4 gigs. AMD 8 core and a ASUS motherboard. Everything was bought this year. Except for the Video cards. I am trying to update the ATI software but it is locked so i cant.
View 2 Replies View Related