Recovery Partition and Repair Reinstallation

[buggaby]

I would like to do some type of reinstall on my Windows 7 box to clean up the OS a bit (it's been kind of buggy lately). It is a Gateway laptop and it had Windows 7 factory installed, so I immediately made the suggested OS restore disks and what-not.

I also noticed that there is a 12 GB recovery partition with this install, but it says that it is empty. I am thinking of trying the repair install method and was wondering if there will be the option to copy the recovery disks onto the recovery partition, or is that something I should do after the install is complete?

Finally, I have partitioned the hard drive but I am unable to shrink the OS volume to less than about 250GB. I want to keep my personal files, so with the repair install, can I increase the size of the personal partition without erasing it?

Thanks!

 

[whs]

1. Here are the Gateway instructions to install from the recovery partition.
2. The recovery partition is not empty. It is just "hidden"
3. Shrinking a volume to less than about 50% is not possible with the Windows facilities because they cannot move the MFT that sits in the middle of the partition/disk. With Partition Wizard you could do it. But there are risks involved and you have to first backup everything on the disk/partition.
4. I would burn the recovery DVDs from the recovery partition asap.

 

[buggaby]

Thanks for the above information. Just one thing about the Recovery Partition volume:

In the Computer Management window where all the drives are displayed, it states the capacity and the amount of free space for each drive. For the Recovery Partition, it says it is 100% free (ie. 11.72GB of 11.72GB is free). What does that mean if the partition is not empty?

 

[whs]

Some manufacturers make strange settings for the recovery partition. I am not sure how the settings are in your case, but I am pretty sure you have a fully functional recovery partition. Why don't you make the first few steps of the Gateway recovery procedure and see whether anything is happening. You can always cancel before going too far.
On my latest Gateway (6 weeks old), the recovery partition is completely hidden. I can only see it in Disk Management. And there it says also 100% free space.

 

[buggaby]

Fair enough. Thanks for the help, WHS. I appreciate it.

Since I don't have an external drive, it is a little annoying to backup stuff on DVDs or whatever. I was reading the instructions on the Gateway link you posted. How safe, do you think, would be the files in the partition not being used in the install? The link says that it will erase the C: partition. Is there much of a chance of messing with the other partitions?

 

[whs]

1. You must get an external drive. I always say that a PC without at least one external drive is useless - LOL. They are so cheap these days. For $50 to $70 you are in business. Check on this site, they have the best offrings of the day listed.

2. The recovery DVDs from the recovery partition you have to burn to DVDs. You will need 2 e.g. DVD-R's. They will become live disks that you can load from the DVD reader.

3. If you reinstall, you first have to save your own data (e.g. to your new external disk). The reinstallation will wipe the whole C: partition. Other partitions will not be affected.

4. In the future, you should use a seperate data partition.

5. Also, you should aquaint yourself with imaging. If you use it, you never have to reinstall again but pull a prior image in which takes 20 minutes. (but you need an external disk or two).

 

[gregrocker]

Most tech enthusiasts find a clean-copy installer of the OS to install using Product Key on COA stickered to machine.

You can borrow any Win7 installer, extract files to desktop, remove ei.cfg file and recompile to burn an all-versions DVD: Bootable ISO - Create from Installation Files

The installer is mostly driver-complete, with newer quickly arriving via Optional Windows Updates. Any missing drivers can then be found on the Support Downloads webpage for your computer or Device, or drivers/apps disk.

 

[buggaby]

Interesting... Are you saying that I could get a copy of Windows 7 from someone else and install that using the product key on my computer? And then, I wouldn't have all the junk installations from Gateway. That would be the best I think. If that's true, I just need to find someone else's install disk, right?

I caved and purchased an external drive today (250GB - $70 taxes in - not bad). When I get the new OS up and running, I'll image it. Thanks for the suggestions.

 

[gregrocker]

Until recently when they were bought by Acer, Gateway would provide a DVD clean-copy of the OS for this purpose, and a drivers/apps CD. Maybe they will send you one if you request it. Let us know what they say.

 

[buggaby]

I just got off with Gateway support. They told me that I could purchase a clean installation disk for about $20. When I first opened my computer, I was prompted to burn some recovery DVDs. After I told them that, they said that I can download the drivers from their website and I was given a link to the download site.

So, I have these disks which I was prompted to title:
Windows 7-64 Recovery Disk
Factory Recovery 1, 2 and 3
Drivers and Applications

The first 4 disks are the OS, am I right? And instead of using the last disk, I can just install the drivers that I download from the website.

This discussion is growing larger than I had expected...

 

[Jonathan_King]

Correct, you don't need to use the driver CD, as Windows will automatically find drivers for your hardware. The ones it can't find, you can download from the web.

 

[not so gray matter]

Ouch... $70 for a 250GB HDD!? If theres anyway you can return that and buy a new one, do it! Personally I like LaCie best, but they're usually about 10% more expensive than Seagate and Western Digital.

Newegg.com - Computer Hardware,Hard Drives,External Hard Drives,400GB - 900GB

 

[whs]

Ouch... $70 for a 250GB HDD!? If theres anyway you can return that and buy a new one, do it! Personally I like LaCie best, but they're usually about 10% more expensive than Seagate and Western Digital.

Newegg.com - Computer Hardware,Hard Drives,External Hard Drives,400GB - 900GB

I thought it was a little expensive too for 250GBs. One can get 500GBs for $50. Have a look here. Deals2buy: Storage Devices deals

 

[gregrocker]

$20 isn't bad, probably just the shipping+Handling in their minds. I'd verify again that it is a clean copy of Win7 without the bloatware, just Gateway branding and maybe a few drivers at the most.

MS spent a fortune building Win7 drivers with manufacturers so it would have them in the installer or quickly via optional Windows Updates. This was partly done to keep manufacturers from holding out so we are forced to buy newer hardware, but the net result is you rarely need to add more than a driver or two. I'd still have my wireless driver on hand if needed to get connected quickly to Windows Updates.

Get Adobe Reader and Flash, Java Runtime (maybe free Ofc suite) off their sitess. Maybe Gateway still provides an applications and drivers disk so you can save favorite apps.

 

[buggaby]

Ouch... $70 for a 250GB HDD!? If theres anyway you can return that and buy a new one, do it! Personally I like LaCie best, but they're usually about 10% more expensive than Seagate and Western Digital.

Newegg.com - Computer Hardware,Hard Drives,External Hard Drives,400GB - 900GB

I'm in Canada. I haven't found a better price than that. I can get bigger drives for more money (so the price per GB is lower) but I don't need more than 250GB. Although, now that the two currencies are nearly on par, I'm getting ripped...

 

[buggaby]

I'm saying this just to let whomever know that my question has been answered, and for anyone who stumbles on this thread with the same questions I had.

So, I've reinstalled the OS from a clean version of Windows (an ISO file and ISO burning software) and it's working well. This part only took an hour or two. Windows 7 sure is quicker to reinstall than my last experience (Windows XP). And, I didn't use the recovery partition.

Also, I used Partition Wizard to create a root partition smaller than was allowable by the Windows partitioning utility. Actually, it was a little "fun" because the free version of partition magic doesn't allow you to merge partitions, just split them, delete them, and create them, so when I shrunk the C-partition, I had 100GB left of unallocated space. I successfully used the moving and splitting features in partition wizard with the merging features in Diskpart (the second method). Now it's all good...

Now that I have all the drivers and other main software reinstalled, I just have to image the disk according to the instructions in an earlier post of this thread. Thanks for all the help!

 

[Jonathan_King]

Great, thanks for posting for others. I'm sure someone will appreciate down the road.

Let us know if you need anything else.

 

[whs]

That sure sounds like a success story. Thanks for posting the result. And image as often as you can (I do it daily). One day it will save your bacon.

 

[CarlTR6]

WHS, not to hijack the thread, but I did my first system image with Macrium on Sunday. Went smoothly and without a hitch. I did create the rescue disk and successfully booted from it. After I do a couple of more, I will delete my Windows created images.

 

[whs]

Carl, here is how I use Macrium (but any other good imaging program would do the same). Maybe it gives you some ideas.

I make a daily image of my system and data partitions at boot-up. I have set Macrium to do that automatically. It takes only 9 minutes from my SSD to the internal HDD. Every Sunday, I copy the Sunday image to an on-line external disk into a "weekly folder". Every first of the month I also copy the last image to an external disk "monthly folder" that usually stays off-line. That way I have a whole history all the way back to the initial installation.
In addition I have two 16GB sticks to which I copy my data every 3 months and put it into my bank safe. 3 months later I retrieve the first stick and deposit the latest data copy on the second stick, and so on.