Cleaning up my HD Configuration - help please

mikelanng · 04 Apr 2011

I used to have my Boot disk on my D Drive and some months ago moved everything to my C Drive. It's working fine but I would like to clean up and reformat my old D Drive, but can't get rid of the windows files on there.

Disk Management Console shows me:

Disk 0: D Drive Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition)
Disk 1: C Drive Healthy (Boot, Page File, Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)
Disk 2: E Drive Healthy (Primary Partition)
Disk 3: F Drive Healthy (Page File, Primary Partition)

So how do I make my D Drive so it just shows (Primary Partition) so I can reformat it?

Any help would be much appreciated

Mike Connor · 04 Apr 2011

Once you start moving things about like that it complicates matters very considerably, especially if you need to change something later. For the vast majority of users the system default settings are more than adequate, and unless you have a special reason for changing them it is better not to do so.

Having said that, I don't think you can do much with that configuration in its present state. You appear to have essential system files on both partitions. If you simply remove the system files from D: your system will no longer work.

You could try moving them back to the way they were. See also;

User Folders - Change Default Location - Windows 7 Forums

But what I would do in a situation like that is to reinstall windows and set it up properly. If you have good backups of your data that should not be a problem. Your system will then be fresh, and you wont waste a great deal of time and effort on something quite involved and complex which also might not work.

Regards....Mike Connor

seekermeister · 04 Apr 2011

You can easily test whether D: is essential to booting the OS by simply disconnecting it. If you can't boot to C: that way, then the initial boot is on the MBR of D: (which is quite likely). In that case, you would need create that initial boot on C: with something like the FIXMBR command, but I would need to leave that aspect to someone else, because my understanding of it is somewhat foggy.

SIW2 · 04 Apr 2011

It's very easy to do - lost track of how many times I have done this.

I use commands ( much quicker),

But the simple way is :

1. Mark your win 7 partition on C Active ( I see it already is - so skip that bit )

2. Mark your Active partition on D Inactive ( you need to use diskpart commands , or a 3rd party partition manager for that bit ).

If you don't have a partition manager -from cmd prompt type: (press enter after each line)

diskpart

sel vol d

inact

exi

3. Good idea to set your windows 7 drive first in bios boot order.

4. Boot your 7 recoverydisc/dvd and run startup repair - might take 3 runs.