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#11
Alright, good news and bad news!
Good news is, it went pretty smoothly. Just made a copy of all of the essential drivers on my USB and went ahead and formatted my hard drives during installation.
Bad news is, my laptop seems to only recognize the partition of my hard drive that contains Windows 7.
Any suggestions? There's over 100GB of hard drive space that seems to have vanished!
Press start, right click computer, press manage, press disk management, and post a screen shot.
Yeah, I figured that out an hour or two ago. Now I have yet another problem. My two partitions are now currently recognised. But now my entire directory is geared towards the smaller one. All of my program files and installation default settings are set to the smaller hard drive. Any ideas? Best case scenario I can send all of my user files, program files etc to the bigger partition. Leaving only Windows 7 itself on the smaller one. Then I can just change the settings in my directory but this isn't working so far. My program files are now split between the two of them because stupidly I've already tried to send them across but only some of them will. And now they won't go back!!
I'll post a few screen shots. C is the smaller drive in this case, E is the large drive.
That is not Disk mgmt. Type Disk Management in Start Search box, maximize the window to take a screenshot of the entire window, just like it says clearly in Disk Management - Post a Screen Capture Image.
Did you unplug all other HD's and boot the installer as it says in Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7?
Then during a Custom Install, did you use the Drive Options pictured in Steps 7 and 8 of Clean Install Windows 7 to delete all partitions and either Create New and Format or just click Next to let the installer do it for you?
If you didn't do these most basic steps or aren't otherwise following the tutorials like you ignored the Disk Management - Post a Screen Capture Image steps which couldn't be clearer, then I would do it over. This time read over every step of Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7 and ask back if you have any questions.
To answer your question, I assumed he wanted me to open up device manager to see if it was there. I had already realised that and sorted it out. I have attached a screenshot anyway. I don't have any external hard drives to attach. But I did unplug all peripherals. What I did was format both partitions of the hard drive and installed Windows 7 onto the smaller one. Other than that, I just clicked next at every step. When I booted up, only the smaller of the two was there. I went into device management and saw that the bigger part wasn't actually designated. So I just named it E.
It didn't let me create a new partition so I just went along with what was there. Doing it again probably isn't going to change that.
That's a real mess. It looks like the boot files were written to a huge data partition at the front of the drive where the paging file also was somehow moved, while the OS is in a tiny 11gb partition at the end of the HD. Can you see that?
It really needs to be done over, deleting all partitions at Steps 7/8 during Clean Install Windows 7 .
The only way I can see to salvage it is to shrink E to 200mb to fashion a System Reserved boot partition, after moving the Paging File back to C. Use Partition Wizard bootable CD to Move/Resize Partition - Video Help to shrink E and then drag the left border of C to the left to take up all of the shrink space. You'd then remove the E drive letter so it can be a true System Reserved partition marked only System Active Primary, while C is now marked Boot (meaning presently booted), Page File, Primary.
Last edited by gregrocker; 19 Aug 2013 at 10:21.
Follow the illustrated steps in Clean Install Windows 7.
Always delete all partitions during install using Drive Options in Steps 7/8. Then create and format New there, or if you have no partition scheme in mind just highlight Unallocated Space and click Next to have the installer do it for you.
In addition read over these steps for Clean Reinstall - Factory OEM Windows 7
which are the same for retail and collect everything that works best so you will end up with a perfect install, and keep it that way as long as you stick with the tools and methods given.