The tutorial I referred you to gives step by step instructions using Partition Wizard
Partition / Extended : Logical Drives
Your OS can be logical (logical drive an extended partition) because you have a primary System Reserved partition.
I don't know how you did it, but can be done in win7 itself and is 100% save!
In disk management rightclick on RECOVERY partition and click "delete volume".
do the same for HP_TOOLS partition. They aren't involved in the boot process at all! And system reserved and C stay in exact same position. Reboot and post screenshot of diskmanagement again
The recovery partition is only 16 GB and is important, of course, for recovery. His C: is 282 GB. This could be made an extended partition rather than primary containing say 2 logical drives. For example one 100GB logical drive for OS & programs and 182 GB logical for data.
Hi mjf and Kaktussoft.
The conclusion I take from the issues I described is that my machine (or this particular HP range) reacts badly to having the HDD layout modified.
Trying to use Windows contol panel/recovery or HP's recovery simply wouldn't work (either with an image previous to the partitioning and another made after the partitioning).
Being without recovery tools is not an option, so I'll leave things as they are.
Many thanks for your help, it is kindly appreciated.
I think it would be very useful for others who have specifically undertaken the change of the HP OS partition to logical to comment. I don't own an HP PC.
@Montmorency
As to general imaging and restore without any changes to the original partition structure this should definitely work.
One Brand of PC boots through the Recovery partition but the HP boots through a system reserved so even if you wanted to delete the Recovery partition, I can't see the problem.
Finally, I'm a bit confused in that I thought you said you had deleted the Recovery partition? It is possible you did something inadvertently.
Last edited by mjf; 16 Aug 2012 at 16:03. Reason: typo
Yes, I deleted the Recovery partition and extended C: to find myself with a fourth Logical partition.
I don't think I did anything wrong because I went through this process twice (second time was to make sure that I hadn't mess up the first one) and both times I followed the tutorials and threads here at SevenForums very carefuly.
I believe that the method you showed
Partition / Extended : Logical Drives could do the trick, but now I'm a bit affraid of seriously screwing the PC.
Anyway, I can live with my current layout, no big deal.
Thanks again mfj.
If you have already deleted the Recovery partition then Method 2 of the tutorial I referred isn't going to help you. The purpose of Method 2 was to safely have more than 4 partitions and retain the Recovery partition.
Did you make recovery DVDs?
It would be best to send in a Disk Management Screenshot of your current system before you do anything else.
(I'll be offline for awhile)
Let me post everything I did (remember my machine already had 4 primary partitions).
1 Delete recovery partition
2 Expand C
3 Shrink C
4 Create new simple volume
By now I had System/C/H (the new partition, Logical)/HP tools.
Reboot.
Then I created an image of the whole disk using Windows imaging tool. I had as well an image created before the partition process. Both images were on an external HDD.
Reboot twice.
Then I decided to restore the new image just to make sure everything was working properly. Here things started to go wrong.
Control Panel/Recovery didn't work, it showed a message saying "a recent hardware or software change prevented Windows form start" (not the exact words).
HP's Recovery Manager didn't work as well and gave me the same message.
Trying to recover from the other image (the one I made before partitioning) produced the same results.
Now I was worried and tried the Recovery DVDs I had made right after buying the machine. Bad surprise: they were corrupted.
Last option: the repair DVD (fortunately I made it right after the recovery ones).
Success! I was finally able to recover from my first image and the machine went back to the original state.
All this took me the best part of 20 hours over several days.
Now is too late to check exactly what went wrong, but as you surely understand, I don't want to go through all that mess again.
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