First use of Macrium Reflect: Questions

Alright, I am back. Had meant to lie down for only a brief nap but sleep overtook me.

So, due to Partition Wizard Home Edition (PW) not being able to help, I searched around for an alternative and found Easeus Partition Master 10.2 (EPM).

(I decided against experimenting with an edition of PW that is 4 or 5 years out of date, but nonetheless I thank ignatz for trying to help out.)

Easeus annoyingly tries hard during installation to install all sorts of crapware also, so be on the lookout for that. Once installed, converting the disk from dynamic to basic was straightforward. In the middle, a warning came up that an error was discovered and continuing could cause data loss and prevent me from booting.

I decided to go ahead and let the operation complete. Shut down, restart. Stuck at first screen even before I get a chance to swipe my fingerprint. Shut down, restart. This time Windows loads. A couple of errors in Event Viewer.

Source: volmgr | Event ID: 46

If I understand the Microsoft Support page correctly, I shouldn't worry about that too much: https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2756313/en-us

HP Drive Encryption tells me that Windows ( C: ) drive is encrypted, so that is good.

Now here is a screenshot of Disk Manager. As you can see, the dynamic disk was successfully converted back to basic. Please compare this screenshot to the one that I linked in post #9 of this thread. Before, four partitions were "primary", now two are "primary" (namely, SYSTEM and Windows ( C: ) and two are "logical" (HP_RECOVERY and HP_TOOLS). Is that good or bad?

If bad, please provide step-by-step instructions to remedy. If good, please give detailed explanation of why I needn't worry. I must know, because presumably HP had a reason to make all four partitions primary when they built this computer.

How can I fold the "unallocated space" back into one of the partitions (probably C: since that is where it came from)?

whs said:

I am really sorry I was not sufficiently alert yesterday night and drove you thru all those exercises.

Don't sweat it. "Wo Menschen arbeiten, passieren Fehler."

It would be nice to know a bit more about the pros and cons of having four primary partitions vs. fewer. And why HP chose to set four partitions as primary.

But if you had enough of the experimenting

Right now I have some catching up with work to do, so maybe at a later date.

Regarding your visual impairment, I don't know which browser you use. But I checked in Mozilla Add-ons (for Firefox) and strangely, there is no add-on that will automatically highlight links on a web page.

However, I found: Firefox Accessibility Features

According to them:

Follow this path to access the fonts and colors control panels in Firefox.
Tools > Options > Content > Fonts & Colors.
There you will be able to select the fonts that you would like to use, the font sizes, and the colors for text, background, etc.
For finer font family and size customizations including setting a minimum font size, click on the Advanced tab.
If you would like for your settings to persist through all web pages and Firefox sessions, be sure to uncheck the option where in the advanced section it says, "Allow page's to use their own fonts, instead of my selections above".
The same goes for colors as well. Uncheck, "Allow pages to use their own colors, instead of my selections above".

So perhaps that would work as a quick fix for you.

Something else has come up.

All system restore points are gone. Not a big deal, but the relevant window is showing something odd.

When you have time after the holidays, could you give me your opinion on this? I haven't restarted the computer since it first started after successfully converting the partitions from primary to basic, will leave it running for now.

Thank you, good to know.

Chances are that it's some remnant from the "convert dynamic->basic" operation. I usually worry that anything weird-looking is a harbinger of worse things to come, but since your system is running o.k. while showing a similar condition I'm deciding to check it off my list of things to worry about :)