Hey all, let me say this forums has been a great tool whenever I have problems with my win7 PC and I finally decided to register. I recently bought a Windows 7 Home laptop from an online retailer and decided to install Windows 7 Ultimate x64 on a new partition. A few weeks later, I decided to delete the old Win 7 Home partition, but I can't allocate the unused space to my Windows 7 Ultimate partition.
If it was me, I do clean install Windows 7 & full clean of the HD.
Clean Install Windows 7
SSD / HDD : Optimize for Windows Reinstallation
is there anything else I can do besides that? I really don't want to have to do that over again.
JJD,
Actually, there is:
- Make yourself a System Repair Disk
- Use Windows Backup and Restore to create a system image of your E drive on an external USB drive.
- Boot from the system repair disk
- Go to a command prompt
- Run DiskPart and the Clean All command
- exit out of diskpart
- Shutdown your system
- Boot from the system repair disk
- Choose the option to install a previous system image
- Connect your external usb drive
- Tell the system image repair program where the image is.
- Let system restore.
Procedure is actually quite simple.
I've done this before myself a couple of times.
Here are some "how-to" infos
START | type System Repair | Enter key | Create Disk buttonCREATE A SYSTEM REPAIR DISK
CREATE A SYSTEM IMAGE BACKUP
· START | type Backup your computer | Enter key
· In left-hand pane, select Create a System Image
· select where you want to save the backup | Next
· Select the drives you want to backup | Next
· Start Backup button
· Finish button after completion
GO TO A COMMAND PROMPT USING A SYSTEM REPAIR DISK & clean a drive
1) Make a System Repair Disk (WIN key| type Create System Repair Disk | ENTER key)
2) Insert System Repair Disk into optical reader.
3) Shutdown your computer.
4) Boot up your computer from the System Repair Disk (if needed, Power on button, immediately hit F2 key, change boot order to have boot from cd/dvd first).
5) Wait while a mini-version of Windows is loaded and finally the System Recovery Options dialog appears.
6) SYSTEM RECOVERY OPTIONS dialog |
will show Select a keyboard input method |
NEXT button
7) SYSTEM RECOVERY OPTIONS dialog
will search your system for installed versions of Windows.
8) SYSTEM RECOVERY OPTIONS dialog |
select the Use recovery tools that can help fix problems starting Windows radio button |
NEXT button
9) SYSTEM RECOVERY OPTIONS |
will show Choose a recovery tool and list the following |
System Repair
System Restore
System Image Recovery
Windows Memory Diagnostic
Command Prompt
10) Click on command prompt
11)
WIPE A DISK CLEAN
· type DiskPart, Enter key
· type List disk, Enter key
note the numeral of the disk you want to clean
for example purposes, I’ll be using the numeral 0
· type Select disk 0, Enter key
· type Detail disk, Enter key
this info will let you know if you selected correctly
· type Clean ALL, Enter key
your entire disk is being overwritten with zeros.
This can take a considerable amount of time
· type EXIT, Enter key (only after Clean is finished)
· type EXIT, Enter key (this gets you back where you were)
12) SHUTDOWN button
Now you can boot backup from that repair disk and do the actual restore.
Hope you manage to follow all of my cut/paste operations.
It's easier and quicker to do all of this and it is to document such.
alright thanks! I'll try this when I get my enclosure
I tried the second step (create system image) but it gave me the error that I attached a screenshot of that the drive didn't have enough space even though it was an empty 500GB that I formatted before doing it. It's actually a 3.5 I stuck in an enclosure, would that matter? Also what settings should I be using to format?
To extend into space to the left you need to use free Partition Wizard bootable CD, which has has been used to do this very operation hundreds of times here.
If you do not use Bitlocker then you should also delete the 100mb System Reserved partition which was created by 32 bit Win7 and thus the necessary MBR repair may not work with 64 bit Startup Repair.
The MBR must be recovered into the 64 bit Win7 partition by marking partition Active and then booting the Win7 DVD REpair console or 64 bit Repair CD to run Startup Repair up to 3 separate times with reboots until Win7 starts.
Follow the steps in Option One shown in this new tutorial with screenshots: Partition Wizard : Use the Bootable CD
System Repair Disc - Create
Ok, so I tried everything greg said. and after doing startup repair the second time, I got windows to successfully boot. But everytime I login, it takes me to a blank blue screen and the build 7600 - windows is not genuine is the only thing showing in the bottom left corner and the curser - no desktop, start menu, taskbar, nada.
I tried looking up the partition in partition manager after rebooting with the disc inside and it seems like all the data is still there, since about 31GB are used up, but it just won't load the desktop. I've tried restarting it several times and ran startup repair once (it found no problems) to no avail.
I'm thinking I should pop in my original install disc and run the repair installation function on the installation menu. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
There is another way.
download ubuntu Download | Ubuntu
burn the iso file to a cd or dvd or use unetbootin UNetbootin - Homepage and Downloads
to install to a freshly formatted 1GB or larger flash drive (recommended cause it's faster that way)
reboot at the prompt and boot into ubuntu.
at the top left corner are the dropdown menus. go to system>administration>gparted
from there you can move your system partition to the right and expand it to fill all of your free space.
It will take a long time to do so, and there's maybe < 1% chance of errors.. but when it's done, reboot... I use gparted all the time and you can download just the gparted application, but the version that comes with ubuntu has better support for NTFS and other file systems
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