Hello caho, and all others following this thread,
I know this is an old thread, but I ran into a similar problem that caho describes just yesterday, 7/6/2010. I have a brand new Intel i3 laptop that came preloaded with the Win 7 Home Premium OS. It also had a "Diagnostic" partition and a "Recovery" partition. You may be able to guess the well known and very popular manufacturer of this system, but I will not say who it is in this forum. These other 2 partitions just happened to be positioned before the "OS" partition. My goal was to update Windows 7 Home Premium to Windows 7 Ultimate, and to delete those unnecessary partitions to recover the almost 20 GB of hard disk space they took up. I would not need the "Recovery" partition anymore, since I was updating to Ultimate, and the package came with a diagnostic CD, so I don't need the "Diagnostic" partition either. If any of what I say is incorrect, please correct me. I am no expert, but I believe what I say is accurate. Here is what I did to accomplish my goals.
I first made an image backup of my hard drive using the Control Panel backup facility. (A very good move, as it turned out!) I then used "EasyBCD 2.0 Beta", available from
NeoSmart Technologies, to discover that the MBR pointed to the 1st (diagnostic) partition to find the BOOTLDR. Since I was going to delete partitions 1 and 2, I needed to "move" the BOOTLDR on to the 3rd partition (OS), so I used EasyBCD to create a BOOTLDR on the 3rd partition and set it up to boot Win 7, then rewrote the MBR to reflect this change and saved the EasyBCD setup. I rebooted to verify that it still worked, which it did. I then used the GPartEd program to delete the 1st (diagnostic) partition. Again, I rebooted to make sure that Win 7 would reboot OK. It did, so my BOOTLDR and MBR changes were succussful. I then used GPartEd to delete the 2nd partition, move the 3rd partition to the beginning of the disk, and increase its size to fill up the just freed up space. It took GPartEd over 2 hours to complete these modifications. Remember this fact as you read on. Now rebooting was broken, so as caho described, I used the Win7 install CD to repair the BOOTLDR. Now, just as caho described, Win7 appeared to boot up OK, but after it finished, I was left with a blank light blue backgroung screen with the message "This copy of Windows is not genuine." in the lower right corner. I could CTRL+ALT+DEL to the task manager and start up a cmd window, but no programs would run. BTW, instead of the OS being on C: like it should be, it was now on V:! I could also run "explorer", but it would start up with a "temporary profile" and would not let me access any files or do much of anything. Totally useless, just as caho described!
I next used the Win7 install CD to restore the backup image, I had made before, to get my system back to what it was originally. To make a long story short, I did all this again just to make sure I hadn't missed something. No joy! Same result! Apparently, Win7 is VERY sensitive to using GPartEd to manipulate disk partitions. I found it to cause Win7 to think it is not genuine in every case. I had used it to do similar partition manipulations on Vista platforms, with no problem, as far as I can remember, at least nothing that could not be fixed. Calling MS for tech support got me absolutely nowhere on trying to re-authenticate my copy of Win7. Are you surprised?
After looking around the internet for any solutions, I ran across this little gem of a program. If caho has not found an answer yet, I recommend downloading Partition Wizard Home Edition from
Magic Server Partition Manager Software - Resize partition for Windows Server 2003, 2008 and 2000.. It's free! Abandon the use of GPartEd for Win7 stuff. It's great for Linux. I use it all the time, but it just doesn't work for Win7, for me anyway.
On my just restored system, I went back and redid the EasyBCD stuff to get a bootable system off the right partition again. I then used Partition Wizard for the first time and intuitively used its easy GUI interface to delete the partitions 1 and 2, then moved the 3rd to the beginning of the disk. Nothing I had not already done with GPartEd, except Partition Wizard is a windows app, not Linux. BTW, Partition Wizard could not manipulate the OS partition since it was in use, but not to worry, it has a "boot mode" that does what is needs on the next restart. When it finished doing its thing in about 10 minutes! (recall GPartEd took over 2 hours) and rebooted, I fully expected to get the same broken BOOTLDR crap, and a non-genuine copy of Win7, but Voila!, no such thing! Win7 booted up with no problem after Partition Wizard did its magic! Amazing after all the fuss with using GPartEd. I then used Partition Wizard a second time to expand the OS partition to fill out the disk, which it could do "on-line". I am a believer now in Partition Wizard, and it is free.
Now on to updating Home Premium to Ultimate. Turns out you cannot update from a perfectly good Ultimate distribution CD! You must use the Windows Anytime Update feature of Home Premium. Gag! I have a perfectly good product key and CD from my MSDN subscription. As it turns out, at least for product keys obtained from MSDN, you can enter it into the Windows Anytime Update key, and it will update OK. Apparently all the functionality of Windows 7 is actually there for any edition, you just have to have the right key to unlock it. Going from Home Premium to Ultimate took less than 10 minutes.
My goal is accomplished.
I know this is long and wordy, but I wanted to relay my experience, so somebody else won't have to go through the pain and agony I did.
Charles
