Unallocated spaces at the beginning & end of the BOOT disk

AddRAM said:

That is an old shot, let`s get one when windows is installed, I assume you still have to do that, correct ?

Correct, that will take a bit. Right now I used a combo of both AOMEI & PW to repartition the drive to see if the spaces vanish.

They did, but without WINDOWS I have nothing to paste the screenshot to tranfer to this laptop to upload.

Will now install WIN7 & cross my fingers!!!!!!!!!!!

OK, this is the current partitioning of the drive with the old system restored. Now I need to repartition the drive to allow for the FRESH install on the 2nd partition. I will repeat the procedure with the combination of AOMEI + PW that I did when I had no installed system.

OK, that has appeared to have worked!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have yet to do the FRESH install, but I will create a RESTORE point before doing so & will report back after that install.

I am not out of the woods just yet. Nonetheless, what have I learned?

1st & foremost, almost everyone one of you guys that post to this forum I guess on a daily basis had virtually NO CONSENSUS as to the cause & what is normal behavior for the partitioning of a drive. I think only ADDRAM & DAVIDE empathized with my position that this was very odd & probably should not be accepted. All others chalked it up to alignment, OS, boot mgr, & even ROCKER had complete disdain or completely dismissed the concern altogether.

Is this normal to have such diverging opinions on something that has been on the market & used so universally as these products have been? If I had been a child with a blindfold on trying to strike a PINATA given your directions I would not have gotten it.

So in the end do you guys think this was a QUIRK with my system alone or is it systemic to all partition managers? If it is systemic should this be addressed by the software developers?

Layback Bear said:

I'm still not sure how you are getting the result you are getting at the beginning and ending of your drives. But I will continue to monitor the thread to learn what is actually happening and how it is fixed.

As I showed in my screenshots on post #24 of this thread, somehow I too had a small 11MB unallocated area at the right end of my DISK3 (as shown by PW).

I don't' how it got there, other than somehow over the years and drive upgrades as has been mentioned. Sometimes a source partition from one drive may have been copied directly to a second drive, sometimes partitions on one drive were resized, sometimes partitions were copied out from source location to an intermediate USB 3.0 backup drive and then copied back when the drive hardware upgrade/replacement was complete. And depending on whether the 3rd-party product offered an option to resize the receiving partition to make it different than the size of the sending partition, this may or may not have also occurred. I only use Partition Wizard and Macrium Reflect, so those are the only two products which could possibly have explained my 11MB of unallocated space. I NEVER USE DISKMGMT.MSC, so it couldn't possibly have been something that Windows did.

Probably all of these possible explanations are reasonable. Certainly I've never seen unallocated space of any kind just spontaneously appear once the partitioning has taken place, however it took place. I can't possibly imagine having multiple partitions on a drive with zero unallocated space at left or right (as viewed from a particular 3rd-party product), and then a day or two later suddenly open space now exists! Seems impossible, unless there was something else that took place which could somehow resize the existing partitions... and for sure you'd know about it, since you were the one who did it. Otherwise, partitions don't just resize themselves, and it seems highly unlikely that PW can present a view of the partitions on a drive one day that is different from that same view two days later, if nothing had taken place in between to cause the partition boundaries to be adjusted.

Anyway, as was shown in my post #24, I simply used PW to "extend" the adjacent partition to the left of the 11MB unallocated space, pushing the slider all the way to the right so that all of the available unallocated space would be absorbed by the partition to its left, and zero unallocated space would remain. That happened, and it's "still holding". Still no unallocated space has returned.

I would recommend that PW be the tool used to do just that if necessary, no matter how the unallocated space came to exist. Just "extend" the partition to the left (or right) of this unallocated space to consume all of the adjacent unallocated space, and that should be the end of it. I trust PW.

AddRAM said:

And I would have hoped you created and marked active a windows install partition, so you don`t end up with a System Reserved partition, it`s a waste of space.

A perfect windows install partition will look like this, heck with that SR partition. (no page file shown as I don`t use one) that would be the only difference.

I think I am screwed on the SYSTEM RESERVE partition because the old image contains one & I doubt I can remove it now since restoring that image will wipe any FRESH installation from the drive.

Correct?

I like others became complacent & thought the "SHADOW" partition was a necessity. At least I know the system will work & the "SHADOW" does not grow in size with time.

You can move the boot code to the [C] partition so you would no longer use or need the System Reserved partition.
Here is a tutorial by whs for this:
Bootmgr - Move to C:\ with EasyBCD

Personally i don't think it's worth the effort, and i don't know of any problems having and using a System Reserved partition causes.

I'm considering going the other way, creating a System Reserved partition and moving the boot code to that from my Win 8.1 partition.
If I do it, it will be when (if) i upgrade the Win7-32 OS to Win 10.