Change system partition?

Did you get the prompt to load drivers during your first install to this HD?

Did you Wipe with one set of zeroes before creating the partition?

Do you have your SATA controller drivers from the Support Downloads webpage for your computer or mobo? Unzip them to stick or CD to browse to from the Load Drivers link. This should not be necessary with Win7, especially if it wasn't before, but could be exceptional.

If you need help finding the drivers, post back your computer or mobo model.

Well, I have a disk of drivers and utilities that came with my computer, its just that all the drivers are labelled with long strings of numbers so I have no clue which one is the one I want. My computer is a Dell XPS 625, though not sure as to how that will help.

Your SATA drivers are here. http://support.dell.com/support/down...n&catid=&impid=

Click Change Product, Put in your Tag Number to get more exact choice for your build. Then download and unzip SATA controller driver (likely the AMD) to stick or CD, browse to it from Load Drivers link.

Thank you so much. The driver is exactly what I needed to get it to work. After I loaded the driver, it was able to detect Windows 7. I ran Startup Repair, only had to run it once in fact, and now I can log in again. The best part is, thanks to the messing around with Partition Wizard, now it's the only OS on my computer, located at the front of my HD, and more or less has the entire HD at its disposable. Thanks to everyone who was kind enough to give me advice on how to get through this mess.

Glad that it worked as we were overdue for some good news on this.

I have never heard of the Repair utility needing SATA controller drivers to be able to repair.

If you'll post back another screenshot of the full Disk Mgmt drive map, we can look it over to be sure there are no potential problems.

It sounds like you Resized Win7 into the left hand side of your HD. If not is that what you want to do?

Yes, I had used Partition Wizard to resize it to the left of the HD before loading the driver and running Startup Repair. And apparently installing Windows 7 on SATA hard drives is an issue for a lot of people. Here's the disk management screen.

In hundreds of repairs we have helped with here, SATA drivers were never required.

In only the rarest cases are they required for install because Win7 has almost all SATA drivers in the installer but not some older IDE drivers.

We will learn from this and take the error at face value in the future, since it can also mean other things like corrupted install media.

Nice work for sticking with it. We never give up either.

Okay so I'm trying to change my system partition as well. I bought my laptop and decided to install Windows 7 Ultimate to partition C:. Now I have a left over OS on my smaller system partition F:. It bugs me for two reasons: 1) I still have left over files on the drive and 2) I still have this old OS as a boot option in my boot loader. Here is a screenshot of Disk Management:

How do I go about changing this partition F: to a deletable partition?

First move the System flag (and boot files) to C by running Startup Repair - Run up to 3 Separate Times.

Once the System flag is on C, you can delete F and resize C into the space to the left which is the preferred area of the HD for the OS. This tool makes it fun and easy: Partition Wizard Resize Partition Video Help.

Download the Bootable CD ISO for PW which is safest, burn to CD using Windows Image Burner. Boot CD, rightclick F to Delete, click OK.

Then rightclick C to Resize, drag left border to the left to take up deleted F's space, click OK, Apply Steps.

In rare cases resizing on the boot sector requires running Startup Repair again so keep the disk handy.