Hard drive Partition Problem

[si8mon]

A while back i decided to dual boot my windows 7 computer with Linux mint. During the install of Linux it made a 97 gig partition of my hard drive for the OS.
After i found Linux was complete crap (it nearly destroyed windows 7). I uninstalled it and when back to win 7 as my only OS.

The partition for Linux was from my vista drive. So when i tried to put the partition back on the vista drive the disk management tool wouldn't let me. The 97 gig partition for some reason has now become an extended partition of my D drive (where win 7 is on). The 97 gig partition is labeled as free space but i also cant delete it as that option is grayed out on the computer management tool.

Is there any way i can get the 97 gig partition to merge back with the Vista Drive. Thanks

I also have some screen shots, the green shaded drive is the 97gig partition.

By the way im new to the forum hope i haven't posted this in the wrong place.

 

[iseeuu]

Hello Si8mon;

You are correct, the built-in Windows 7 Disk Management is not capable of doing what you want. You will need a third party app. There might be one (like GParted) on your Linux install cd if you can boot to it and it offers a "live" Linux OS. Otherwise, one popular utility here is Partition Wizard. Also, you will find a link to another utility that used GParted in the links at the bottom of this page.

The "Extended Partition" can exist as one of the 4 "Primary Partitions" allowed by Windows. However, within the Extended Partition there can be many partitions, so you actually have two partitions involved here. After deleting the Linux partition, you will need to shrink the Extended Partition in order to use the empty space.

Cheers!
Robert