OK - I've sorted out all the non bootable drives
Now I wonder if I use the same procedure to deal with my c: drive. Obviously I don't want to corrupt my OS.
I understand what you did. I don't know what software you're using to display these drives and why the colors have changed on the GPT drives.
But for sure, there's nothing wrong with your C drive that requires any change from what it is right now.
(1) If a drive is formatted as GPT, it may or may not have that 128MB overhead "MSR" (as was explained earlier by Jumanji). So you've apparently deleted that optional space on the two non-boot data drives, and also enlarged the partitions on your two GPT drives Disk3 and Disk4 to annex that space on both drives.
Good. There is no longer anything shown on those disks representing anything other than the G and H partitions themselves.
(2) You have apparently converted Disk6 to now contain partition I allocated as a "primary" partition whereas originally it was allocated as a "logical" partition". Thus the normal 8MB "extended partition" overhead (required when you have one or more "logical" partitions allocated on the drive, inside of that "extended partition") would no longer be necessary.
A "primary" partition does not have any overhead. So when you converted the original I from logical to primary, the original 8MB "extended partition" overhead would be available to annex into the I primary partition replacement, thus making 100% of the available formatted space on the drive available to I as you've shown.
Good again.
(3) Disk5 contains the standard 100MB "system reserved" partition (of which about 50MB is actually in use) which the Win7 installer will create for holding Boot Manager, whenever you install Win7 from scratch onto a new empty hard drive. It also contains the C (operating system) partition which will normally utilize all of the remaining available space on the originally empty drive unless you step in and alter the standard installation defaults.
For example, if you had wanted a smaller C and had wanted to make the rest of the drive i.e. to the right of C) available for a "data partition", you should have pre-partitioned the drive before installing Win7, allocating the "data partition" at the high end of the drive and leaving a reduced unallocated free space at the low end of the drive. This would have limited the eventual size of C to only use the reduced unallocated free space, although you still would have gotten the same small 100MB "system reserved" partition.
If you look more closely at Disk5 (with either DISKMGMT.MSC or Partition Wizard or other similar software) you'll see that the small 100MB "system reserved" partition is marked as ACTIVE. That means the BIOS will go there (to the "active" partition on the drive) to find Boot Manager to kick off the rest of the OS boot process. So you can't just delete this 100MB partition without dealing with the need to have one partition on that boot drive marked as active and also containing Boot Manager.
That's actually what Windows Repair will do for you if you absolutely wanted that extra 100MB added to your C partition and deleted the "system reserved" partition, thus making the system UN-BOOTABLE. Because the system is now unbootable, booting to the Windows installation DVD will offer Windows Repair to fix the problem. This would then reinstall Boot Manager into C, and mark it "active", thus restoring bootability to your system but without use of the "system reserved" partition space of 100MB. And then you could use some partitioning tools to enlarge C to the left, to annex that now available 100MB.
But you'd really only be getting net about 50MB of new available capacity into C, since the same 50MB of content (i.e. Boot Manager) would now be in C (which is now the "active" partition for the BIOS to go to at boot time) instead of where it currently is inside of the currently "active" 100MB "system reserved" partition.
==> My recommendation is DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME. This 100MB "system reserved" partition (ACTIVE) is the standard way a newly installed Win7 system looks when installed onto an initially empty drive. It's simply 100MB, of which only 50MB is technically unused and actually available for C.
As I mentioned earlier, if this SSD is from Samsung, I'd more recommend you consider "over-provisioning" (i.e. shrinking C so that there is about 23GB on the drive that is UNALLOCATED, to the right of C) and thus make that space available for use by Samsung Magician to improve SSD performance.
Running Samsung Magician will suggest that option to you, and will also tell you the minimum size of that UNALLOCATED space it would require to satisfy "over-provisioning". Now you really have to decide about the tradeoff: (a) about 23GB unallocated that is theoretically usable in C but resulting in somewhat less than optimal performance of the SSD, or (b) keep it UNALLOCATED and optimize SSD performance.
In my opinion you have so much other space available on your other drives that you might as well optimize SSD performance by "over-provisioning", thus removing about 23GB from use as part of C. But it's up to you... if this is a Samsung SSD.
