Solved Re-partitioning Hard Drive

[darkf0xx]

its never had any os installed, it only started doing that after using that program to merge the partitions.

That external second drive was not even shown in your first screenshot. Was the drive not plugged in at that time?? All that is shown in your earlier screenshot was your one internal hard drive DISK0, and removable disks for DISK1 (G) and DISK2 (H).

In your latest screenshot, you show DISK1 as "dark drive", and now removable G and H appear as DISK2 and DISK3. That's very different than before.

Did it always have 92% utilized and 8% free? Did you suddenly plug in your external hard drive? Was that before or after you used Partition Wizard simply to delete the rightmost partitions on what was DISK0 and "merge" that now unallocated free space on DISK0 in with the large C-partition to its left... all on DISK0. This is what resulted in the now once again single large C-partition on DISK0.

So how and when did this DISK1 "dark drive" suddenly appear?

Using Partition Wizard to do the partition changes you wanted to do is limited to one hard drive. It doesn't work across multiple drives, except if it's involved in "copying a partition" from one drive to another, etc. You wouldn't have been using this function in your "merge" or "resize" task of this thread's subject. You simply would have re-sized C on DISK0 to absorb all of its newfound free-space to its right, which was free by deleting those two unwanted partitions shown in your very first screenshot.

I still want to hear how/when this 2TB "dark drive" DISK1 suddenly appeared? It's strangely identical in size to your DISK0 internal drive, and it has the identical 100MB "system reserved" on it with the rest of the drive allocated to what appears to have been one large C-partition at one time. And yet, unlike your real C it is 92% utilized.

Can you clarify?

The drive has always had that amount used and it is plugged in 24-7 I dont unplug it. All I did was merge the drive, it rebooted at 60% by itself in the middle of the merge, I had to repair the windows because on start up after the failed merge it would just boot loop. The extra drive is external and it is brand new, it has never had an OS installed to it.

 

[dsperber]

The drive has always had that amount used and it is plugged in 24-7 I dont unplug it.

And yet, it does not appear in your screenshot up in post #4 of this thread.

All I did was merge the drive

You did a "merge" using Partition Wizard? Or is your use of the word just a generic figure of speech?

I ask that because along with its "move/resize" Partition Wizard actually does also have a "merge" function, and also an "expand" function". Yes, these are all kind of related but I'm still puzzled by your interesting combination of symptoms, and I don't want to leave the discussion unresolved just because you did finally get your C-partition resized as you wanted:

(1) why didn't your second hard drive show up in the first screenshot? Perhaps it was powered off at that moment, even though you say it is plugged in 24/7? There must be some explanation for why it doesn't show up in your first screenshot.

(2) Curiously, your original screenshot shows TWO 100MB "system reserved" partitions. How could that have happened?? Did you ever actually install Win8 on this same drive? Was it installed as a second bootable OS from Boot Manager, so that you could choose either Win7 or Win8 at machine boot time from the boot manager menu presented?

(3) You say you "merged" the drive, which really is a simple few specific operational steps using Partition Wizard (first "delete" the two unwanted partitions to the right of C, and then "expand" or "move/resize" C to the right to include the now-free unallocated free space previously occupied by the now deleted two unwanted partitions). I suppose you also could have "merged" all three partitions together into the one C-partition and gotten to the same desired end result, but that's not the operational approach I specified when I recommended Partition Wizard be used for its great ease and convenience. You didn't describe the precise Partition Wizard operations you did do, and yet your final screenshot certainly shows those original two unwanted partitions now gone and C is enlarged to use the whole drive.

(4) During your use of Partition Wizard (and you didn't tell us whether you did this starting from the Windows installed program or running from the standalone bootable CD), when you pushed APPLY you say you experienced a strange mid-merge "re-boot loop and BSOD" symptom, which you fortunately managed to stop only by inserting a bootable USB drive (Windows installation disc) and doing a "repair", though you didn't go into too much detail on exactly what that "repair" really consisted of. At the end, apparently your system is once again bootable, and there's only one "system reserved" marked ACTIVE on your DISK0... all of which is good. But the story here is scary.

(5) Your final screenshot now shows the external "dark drive" as DISK1, which curiously has its own "system reserved" 100MB partition on it. It's possible this came from the vendor of the drive with some system tools in it, but it's a very coincidental size and label name since the Win7 "system reserved" created when installing Windows on a drive is also 100MB. Nevertheless, you say this external drive was never previously used as the boot drive in another machine, and that you didn't create the 100MB partition yourself. So, I guess it must just be from the vendor, and not the result of something that just occurred when you worked on DISK0 with Partition Wizard... although I'm still not completely convinced.

If only this external "dark drive" now showing as DISK1 in your final screenshot had also been visible in your first screenshot, or even your second screenshot (which again it was NOT), we might have more info to work with.

The extra drive is external and it is brand new, it has never had an OS installed to it.

Well then, it must just be a 100MB unallocated space named "system reserved" put there by the drive vendor, because it shows up as "unallocated" in your final screenshot. Very strange, as it's unusable and there can't be anything useful in it if it's "unallocated" now.

Could you possibly have actually "moved" the original extraneous second 100MB "system reserved" partition (shown in your first screenshot to the right of C) to the front of the second drive?? Might that be how it got there?? Or did the vendor of the drive just leave 100MB unallocated? Or did you do your own partitioning somehow when you took this new external drive out of the carton and formatted it yourself, since it probably came formatted as FAT32 and you have clearly re-formatted it as NTFS?

I guess we'll never know.

 

[darkf0xx]

The drive has always had that amount used and it is plugged in 24-7 I dont unplug it.

And yet, it does not appear in your screenshot up in post #4 of this thread.

All I did was merge the drive

You did a "merge" using Partition Wizard? Or is your use of the word just a generic figure of speech?

I ask that because along with its "move/resize" Partition Wizard actually does also have a "merge" function, and also an "expand" function". Yes, these are all kind of related but I'm still puzzled by your interesting combination of symptoms, and I don't want to leave the discussion unresolved just because you did finally get your C-partition resized as you wanted:

(1) why didn't your second hard drive show up in the first screenshot? Perhaps it was powered off at that moment, even though you say it is plugged in 24/7? There must be some explanation for why it doesn't show up in your first screenshot.

(2) Curiously, your original screenshot shows TWO 100MB "system reserved" partitions. How could that have happened?? Did you ever actually install Win8 on this same drive? Was it installed as a second bootable OS from Boot Manager, so that you could choose either Win7 or Win8 at machine boot time from the boot manager menu presented?

(3) You say you "merged" the drive, which really is a simple few specific operational steps using Partition Wizard (first "delete" the two unwanted partitions to the right of C, and then "expand" or "move/resize" C to the right to include the now-free unallocated free space previously occupied by the now deleted two unwanted partitions). I suppose you also could have "merged" all three partitions together into the one C-partition and gotten to the same desired end result, but that's not the operational approach I specified when I recommended Partition Wizard be used for its great ease and convenience. You didn't describe the precise Partition Wizard operations you did do, and yet your final screenshot certainly shows those original two unwanted partitions now gone and C is enlarged to use the whole drive.

(4) During your use of Partition Wizard (and you didn't tell us whether you did this starting from the Windows installed program or running from the standalone bootable CD), when you pushed APPLY you say you experienced a strange mid-merge "re-boot loop and BSOD" symptom, which you fortunately managed to stop only by inserting a bootable USB drive (Windows installation disc) and doing a "repair", though you didn't go into too much detail on exactly what that "repair" really consisted of. At the end, apparently your system is once again bootable, and there's only one "system reserved" marked ACTIVE on your DISK0... all of which is good. But the story here is scary.

(5) Your final screenshot now shows the "dark drive" external, which curiously has its own "system reserved" 100MB partition on it. It's possible this came from the vendor of the drive with some system tools in it, but it's a very coincidental size and label name since the Win7 "system reserved" created when installing Windows on a drive is also 100MB. Nevertheless, you say this external drive was never previously used as the boot drive in another machine, and that you didn't create the 100MB partition yourself. So, I guess it must just be from the vendor, and not the result of something that just occurred when you worked on DISK0 with Partition Wizard... although I'm still not completely convinced.

If only this external "dark drive" now showing as DISK1 in your final screenshot had also been visible in your first screenshot, or even your second screenshot (which again it was NOT), we might have more info to work with.

The extra drive is external and it is brand new, it has never had an OS installed to it.

Well then, it must just be a 100MB unallocated space named "system reserved" put there by the drive vendor, because it shows up as "unallocated" in your final screenshot. Very strange, as it's unusable and there can't be anything useful in it if it's "unallocated" now.

Could you possibly have actually "moved" the original extraneous second 100MB "system reserved" partition (shown in your first screenshot to the right of C) to the front of the second drive?? Might that be how it got there?? Or did the vendor of the drive just leave 100MB unallocated? Or did you do your own partitioning somehow when you took this new external drive out of the carton and formatted it yourself, since it probably came formatted as FAT32 and you have clearly re-formatted it as NTFS?

I guess we'll never know.

If you look at the top of the picture the other drive is listed, it only got in the other section after the merge program was used (Partition Wizard), the extra 100mb of unallocated space wasnt in the external (darkdrive) until after I used the program and it was showing up in the same spot as the system hdd. I had windows 8 on the same hard drive (same as win7 not the external). I could choose between the 2 operating systems (both on same drive) when I restarted the PC. The system repair that I ran pretty much worked on its own. I pressed F8 to bring up the boot device then selected my flash drive with win7 then chose to run the repair that it offered, I dont know the exact dialogue that was there but it just said something like "run system repair" then while it was repairing a prompt said "this will not change any personal files on your pc."

 

[dsperber]

If you look at the top of the picture the other drive is listed

Well, the original picture in post #4 didn't show the upper-part of the DISKMGMT.MSC output. It only showed the lower part. So we had no idea at all you had a second external drive.

And when you responded to my request in post #10 by showing the complete presentation, you didn't pull the bottom pane section upward (just to the bottom of the top pane, so that the maximum information would appear onscreen at one time) but it's now clear that there is a vertical scrollbar in that lower pane, which WOULD HAVE SHOWN the "dark drive" (J) if only we could have seen it.

Ok. It's probably DISK3 (or maybe DISK4 if your 250MB FAT drive USB stick? is DISK3). The screenshot in post #10 should really have been adjusted by pulling the bottom pane northward, so that we could see all the disks in the lower pane that are enumerated in the upper pane. That would have been very helpful.

Oh well... too late now.

it only got in the other section after the merge program was used (Partition Wizard), the extra 100mb of unallocated space wasnt in the external (darkdrive) until after I used the program and it was showing up in the same spot as the system hdd.

I don't want to point the finger of guilt here, but it's impossible for a "delete" request on the 100MB originally present on DISK0 to magically appear at the front of your second external drive DISK1 (as we now see in later screenshots).

You may say that you don't believe that 100MB of unallocated was on the external drive, but the facts speak differently. Look at the upper pane information in post #10's screenshot, and it shows that J is 1862.92GB which is about right for a formatted 2TB drive. Although we don't see the graphical picture of that drive in the lower pane (because you didn't scroll down to make it visible when you took the screenshot), it's 1862.92GB going into the Partition Wizard operations.

And after the Partition Wizard operations and the USB "repairs" to stop to re-boot loop, the "after" screenshot shown in post #11 (where the external drive now appears as DISK1 in the lower pane) the J partition is still 1862.92GB. So it didn't get changed in size at all.

And that tells me the 100MB unallocated space to its left must ALWAYS have existed on that drive, from the time you took it out of the carton and plugged it in and did the FORMAT to NTFS. Somehow it must have come that way from the vendor, in my opinion.

I honestly don't know what went on that might have caused the re-boot loop you experienced, but I'm also convinced it wasn't Partition Wizard that put that 100MB unallocated at the front of your external drive... which by the way is doing no harm at all just being there.


As far as the former Win8 being on your boot menu along with Win7, did you take any active steps to remove it from that boot menu? Or is it still there?

After installing Win8, did it make itself the default bootable OS, or did you reset that back to Win7 with Win8 as the option? Just curious.

Yes, you deleted the second 100MB "system reserved" along with the 531GB partition where Win8 previously lived, but did you also do anything to change the boot menu (which is still back in the first 100MB "system reserved" partition, presumably pointing to both Win7 and Win8 bootable systems unless you corrected that)? I don't know if boot manager will simply automatically ignore the listed but no longer present second OS on the boot menu list if the partition in which it's supposed to reside no longer exists, so that now with only one bootable OS there's no need to present a menu for you to choose from and it will just instantly automatically go to the Win7 partition to boot.

So, what do you now see at boot time, whereas before you said you saw an option to choose either Win7 or Win8?

 

[gregrocker]

No external drive comes with a deleted System Reserved partition. This would likely happen from random nonsense being applied with imaging or Partition Wizard. When it becomes an issue OP is unable to describe what's been done because they just acted randomly.

For example, under no circumstances was the second System Reserved on the internal drive to have been Merged which would have literally merged the problem into the OS partition. It was made clear that the last two partitions were to be deleted, then C extended. Yet OP continues to say it was Merged. Well, which is it?