Cannot expand my C: after shrinking it?

[xrekirax]

I recently tried to follow the guide by Brink located at http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/8057-dual-boot-installation-windows-7-xp.html about how to dual boot my old XP and Windows 7. Well, I didn't have an actual XP Media Center Edition installation disk (all I had was the OEM), so I tried to dissect the OEM disk to salvage what I could of the files to install XP. Behold, I came up with nothing but the blue screen of death upon trying to install (it worked for a couple of seconds).

So, I just want to "re-expand" my C: to take the unused space I reserved for XP. But, 7 will not let me. I've been playing around but all I can think of as a last resort is to go to an earlier restore point (but, I'm not sure if that would work either). Any help would be greatly appreciated, screenie is attached.


Also, if anyone was wondering, I wanted XP for my gaming (my Gateway NV52 is only clocking at 2.2 GHz with ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics). It handles some games okay, but Gateway decided to sell laptops with Windows 7 incompatible drivers, so my games will frequently crash or lag (and make some horrible noise). I was going to test if I could install XP MCE with some XPLite settings to get the most I could from my poor weak cpu.

Any help with either would be great =) Cheers

 

[theog]

This may help with WinXP.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/68505-sata-driver-load-windows-7-vista-setup.html
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/72185-sata-drivers-slipstream-into-windows-xp-cd.html

This may help with Partitions.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/93322-partition-wizard-use-bootable-cd.html?ltr=P

 

[xrekirax]

Thanks theog, though I've tried the first two already xD I made my own disk and one other one with SP1 and SP2 with all my drivers slipstreamed (I used nLite as well).

But, I'll see what I can do with the third tutorial, that would probably do the trick =)

Thanks.

 

[gregrocker]

The free space is logical, still part of an extended partition. Delete it with Partition Wizard bootable CD and it should become Unallocated Space which you can expand into: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/2670-partition-volume-extend.html

If not rightclick on it with PW and Modify>Convert to Primary.

You might even have better luck installing XP to a Primary partition instead of Logical, once you find the correct installer for your licensed version of XP.