Solved Lost Dell factory recovery partition

[SIW2]

If you want to stick with disk management for partitioning, the only thing it will let you is extend your C partition into the unallocated space.

 

[whs]

That happens when you place an image into a partition that is larger than the original partition from which the image came. Macrium creates the footprint of the originating partition. You should be able to add that space with C - but that won't work with Disk Management. Use the bootable CD of Partition Wizard for that operation.

http://www.partitionwizard.com/download.html (last box on webpage)

http://www.partitionwizard.com/video-help/extend_partition/extend_partition.html

 

[sam49]

Ok guys I will have a go tomorrow

Thanks

 

[mjf]

Another thing as you can see I have my hard drive split in two I have done it like that so if I have to reinstall windows I don't loose all my saved files.

But if I use the recovery CD's to restore the computer it deletes all the partitions and formats it all as one drive, but if I use the Dell factory restore that on the recovery partition it restores the operating system to the "C" drive only and leaves the Data partition as it is.

Actually one of my PCs is an old ACER that split the 1TB HDD with OS and data partitions each close to 500GB. Although I retained the recover partition I only used it once more as an experiment. A large OS partition is a waste IMO. Your image sizes become unmanageable. I repartitioned to give the OS ~200GB and the rest as a data partition. I have relied solely on system imaging plus separate backup for the data partition.

 

[whs]

My OS partitions are in the 30 to 50GB size. All user data is on the spinner - but not a single OS folder was moved.

 

[mjf]

200GB for an OS partition I admit is generous but on a 1TB HDD it's not much. I run at 48GB at the moment which includes some data - my word and excel spreadsheets plus some photos. For me ~100GB is about right to give me a margin. This also fits the size of reasonably priced SSDs.

 

[whs]

I guess I am frugal. I come from the 60GB SSD generation. My biggest internal SSD is 90GB - and that is on a one drive laptop. My big SSDs are externals.