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[FCWM]

Dell Inspiron 7100 W7 Home Premium 64 bit NG15SP1.

I found this thread:

http://community.norton.com/t5/Other-Norton-Products/Do-we-need-to-add-the-quot-dell-partition-quot-...

that indicates that I should back up the 39MB utility partition and the 10.88GB recovery partition once only. If I'm wrong please correct me.

The I was looking at my drives (see below). What's now drive F: used to be my system drive and it "sorta failed" (it's erratic). I cloned it onto a new 2TB drive C: My question is this: it appears that the cloning has created another 10.92GB partition that Computer Manager says is unallocated. I assume I could get rid of this completely (if I knew how) correct?

Thanks, Joe

[Brian_K]

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FCWM wrote:

that indicates that I should back up the 39MB utility partition and the 10.88GB recovery partition once only.

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Joe,

That's correct.

Your old Win7 OS is F: drive because the new Win7 is assigning drive letters. That is appropriate.

Which software app did you use for the clone procedure?

Did you Resize the new Win7 partition or did the cloning app do that?

Which software app created the Movies partition? I suspect Win7 Disk Management.

When I better understand your system I'll be able to advise on removing the unallocated space, etc.

[FCWM]

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Brian_K wrote:

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Which software app did you use for the clone procedure?

I wouldn't swear to this but I think it was HDClone Free.

Did you Resize the new Win7 partition or did the cloning app do that?

  The cloning app expanded the Win7 partition to fill the 2TB drive that replaced the 1TB drive.

Which software app created the Movies partition? I suspect Win7 Disk Management.

  This was created by Minitool Partition Wizard - the W7 tool just wouldn't work. I created it because I couldn't figure a way to stop NG15SP1 for backing up my movies so I moved them all off the C: drive. It took the space from the Win7 partition created by the clone - shrunk it by 500GB.

[Brian_K]

Joe,

Thanks for the info.There is a few things you could do. I'll let you know what I'd do and you can ask for an alternative if you don't approve.

The Recovery partition is the System partition. That means it contains the Win7 booting files. I'd copy these booting files to the Win7 partition and then delete the Recovery partition. You have an image backup of the Recovery partition if you ever need the partition restored but as you can create image backups of Win7 you should never need that Recovery partition again. This will produce about 22 GB of Unallocated Space preceding the Win7 partition. I'd slide the Win7 partition to the left and this will give you 22 GB of Unallocated Space following the Win7 partition. 

At this stage you could resize the Win7 partition smaller and create a Data partition in the increased amount of Unallocated Space or you could resize the Win7 partition larger to take up the Unallocated Space.

[FCWM]

Brian

Thanks for the information.

The copy of the recovery partition - is that a "file copy" into the Win7 Partition or a "partition copy"? In any case, I guess that means I'll be backing it up which is what I'm hoping to avoid.

I tried to create a partition in the unallocated space but Windows said that drive is already at the max number of partitions - I guess the limit is 4.

[DaveH]

Using a standard MBR drive like you have, you are only allowed 4 Primary partitions.

However, a primary partition slot can be used as an "extended" partition and inside of it you can have as many "logical" partitions as you want.  Your N drive for movies is a logical drive.

You can easily create another logical drive but they need to be adjacent to each other, thats why it won't work now with the unallocated space, it's not right next to your existing logical drive.

Your movie partition is almost full, if your planning on adding to your colection you will want to make that bigger.

I agree with Brian about your OS partition, it's way too big with a lot of wasted space, you should shrink that by at least 1TB and use that space for a data partition and a bigger movie partition.

Your also going to have your old 1TB drive availible after everything else is moved around, that can be used as a dta drive, the location to hold your backups, or as extra space to move some stuff off of your external drive.

Dave

[Brian_K]

Joe,

Just regarding the Recovery partition. You should create a Ghost image of this partition, writing the image to another HD. Only one image is needed. You don't need to do it again.

Then you have two options.

1. Leave the Recovery partition in place.

2. Copy the booting files from the Recovery partition to the Win7 partition (only about 50 MB of files) and then delete the Recovery partition. Ask for instructions if you want to do this.

I always use Option 2.