Windows 7: Deleting Partitions.

Hello, I just joined the forums to get some support on one little thing I'm about to do.

About a year ago I bought a Dell XPS M1530 (it came with Vista installed). Last month I decided to do a clean Windows 7 install (I installed the 7 professional edition that I got with the MSDN alliance program).

The thing here is that when I had Windows Vista, the "Computer" folder showed the main Hard Drive (C) and a 10GB Recovery Partition(D).

When I did the installation I decided to format the C drive and install the OS there, but did nothing with D.

Now that I'm done with the installation, with windows working great, I wanna delete the partitions so I can have all the capacity merged together.

I went to the "Computer Manager" tool: The following drives were shown:



This is the info shown on Computer:



I understand that the OS is installed on the C drive and that the D drive might me some stuff that Dell put in in case I want to restore to factory settings. I don't know squat about the two other drives.

The questions are:

Can I delete the other 3 partitions without having any issues?

What do you guys recommend?

Is it ok to format the D drive with Vista info in there?

Is it ok to delete the two partitions that don't show on Computer?



How exactly do I merge the drives/delete partitions?


Thanks for reading, hope you answer.

Right click on D , and choose delete volume. The label of the volume will be green . Right click on it again, and create a new volume in the empty space.

EDIT : Havent noticed earlier that there is a OEM partition that you want to delete .... it may cause a boot problem by deleting an oem partition.

You can only extend to right of C:
Partition or Volume - Extend
Partition or Volume - Delete

OK, so everyone is likely to have a different response ... and here is mine:

Leave the OEM partition alone. It's very small and if you DO delete it, it may present problems. You can surely spare less than 100MB of disk space on your drive.

If the machine has the feature to create recovery CDs/DVDs, use that feature to create them. That should provide you the ability to restore the machine to it's original Vista state -- should you decide to sell it down the road. IF you don't intend EVER to sell it or send it back to the vendor, then you could just not bother with this and remove the Recovery partition.

Personally, I like to have my machines partitioned with a smaller OS volume and a very large Data volume -- because I do regular image backups of my OS volume, and it's nice to be able to write them to the same drive. Then later, I hook the machine into my home network and copy off the backups to a network drive, always keeping the most recent backup locally.

So, I would use the Windows 7 Disk Management utility to shrink your OS volume down to 40GB at most, create a new NTFS data partition, and keep it like that.

Since System Restore is (IMHO) basically a waste of time, I have found this approach to have saved me quite a few times when I needed to restore my system -- and it saves a LOT of time that would otherwise be spent reinstalling software and restoring user settings.

But ... that's just what I do and others will have different ideas.

1. The little OEM partition I would keep. It most likely contains some system tools that you might need down the line. If you have a Windows 7 Ultimate, it may also serve for BitLocker.

2. The little 2.5GB partition you can delete and then add the unallocated space to C.

3. The Vista recovery partition you can also delete if you do not want to maintain a Vista reinstallation capability. Adding it to C is a more complex task. You cannot do it in Windows because it is to the left of C. You can, however, do it with Partition Wizard (use the bootable CD option) . It may be smart though to image your C before you do that - just in case. Use free Macrium for imaging.
Alternatively you can use the freed up D partition as data partition. That would be the smartest move.

The easiest way may be (I guess) ....
As you have the windows 7 installer dvd, you can have another clean install, with formatting entire disk. But in this situation, you have to back up all your data in an external drive, or dvds.

Hello supermati, welcome to Seven Forums!





As the Windows C: partition contains everything needed to start/boot Windows you can, if you choose to, delete every other partition on the Hard Disk Drive (HDD) as has been mentioned, this is a very reliable program that will help you do that; just be sure to have reliable back-ups of anything you would not want to lose before you start.


Partition Wizard Free Partition Tool

Thanks for the input guys.

So far, I've been able to delete the 2.5gb partition volume, then deleted the partition, then transferred that 2.5 unallocated space to the C drive by "extending it".

As of now, this is what the Computer Management screen shows:



I looked around and I have all of the disks that came with the computer:

Some Dell application disks
"Drivers and utilities already installed on your computer" disk
Windows Vista Home Premium 32 Bit SP1 Disk

Would it be ok for me to at least format/clean/empty the D drive considering that I have the physical disks? (Maybe even try to extend it to C later)

Would the disks themselves really work with my computer already having Windows 7 Professional?

Thanks again

The built in Windows tools only work to the right and will not do anything to the left so you will have to use a third party tool to do the rest; do you know how to burn an ISO to disk?

Yup, sure do .