Can't delete partition.

Wow! I'm now a believer in Partition Wizard. The "extend partition" function was truly a one step process. Using the bootable disk eliminated the restart step. See the screenshot. Took me days and days to get up the nerve to do it - took about 45 seconds to actually accomplish. Amazing. The issue with the mouse was due to my using a wireless mouse. I hooked up a USB mouse and everything worked fine.

I'm now ready to reinstall Vista to the unallocated space. If I read your earlier comment correctly, I don't have to make the unallocated space into a partition - I can just load to that space and it will automatically become a partition?

gmatting said:

Wow! I'm now a believer in Partition Wizard.

Aren't we all!

The "extend partition" function was truly a one step process. Using the bootable disk eliminated the restart step. See the screenshot. Took me days and days to get up the nerve to do it - took about 45 seconds to actually accomplish. Amazing.

Correct. Terrific product.

The issue with the mouse was due to my using a wireless mouse. I hooked up a USB mouse and everything worked fine.

Interesting. Most wireless mice/receiver combos work transparently exactly as if they were standard USB wired. No special drivers needed.

This is similar to how video cards work, which ALL are required to be usable straight VGA-mode (i.e. to allow the BIOS to display out to a monitor without any special drivers, before getting to Windows where the vendor-provided driver gets loaded to provide enhanced functionality operation mode.

Anyway, as long as you had a regular USB mouse and got past this issue, great.

I'm now ready to reinstall Vista to the unallocated space. If I read your earlier comment correctly, I don't have to make the unallocated space into a partition - I can just load to that space and it will automatically become a partition?

Yes. I've never installed Vista, but I've installed every other kind of Windows. You can just point to the target unallocated space and it will go there.

Furthermore, the installer detects that you already have an existing Windows installed (your C-partition) and that is also the ACTIVE partition (where the BIOS goes on that drive, to initiate the Boot Manager process). Normally, on a "clean install" of Win7 you'd see (a) "system reserved" 100MB partition marked ACTIVE, with (b) C-partition for Windows. The Win7 installer placed Boot Manager and a 1-OS boot menu into "system reserved". But somehow, in your case your C-partition is also "active" (maybe you upgraded from a WinXP system, where C was already ACTIVE?).

Nevertheless I'm sure the Vista installer will recognize your existing Boot Manager location and contents, and will install Vista to the specified target unallocated space, and will add Vista to the existing Boot Manager menu in C. So following the completion of the Vista install (probably will be seen at the first re-boot), your Boot Manager menu will now present TWO bootable OS's , Win7 and Vista. I don't know which one will be marked "default" at this point but you just use the arrow key to navigate up/down to the right one and then press ENTER.

If you want to manipulate your Boot Manager menu (say, to change which OS is the default, or how long is the time delay before auto-boot to the default OS, or renaming the OS's on the menu, etc.) I recommend you install EasyBCD. You won't need it very often, but when you do its intuitive GUI is very easy to use.


Again, word to the wise: it is highly recommended that you take an appropriate backup of your existing system (in a format suitable for quick restore, e.g. "system image" to an external USB drive) before doing anything that may unintentionally make your system unusable, perhaps through accidental or improper use of a wrong parameter or a wrong command.

Better safe than sorry, even if you don't need to make use of the "system image" backup. It's better to have one (say created by Macrium Reflect Free) than not.