Partition or Volume - Create New

Brink said:

You're welcome Raghs. I'm happy to hear that you got it partitioned. :)

+1 me too.

Hi Brink,
Thank you for your tutorial. But I really need some help here.

I bought a new laptop yesterday (HP DV7 3130 with Windows 7 home premium 64 bit). It came with a 500 GB Hard drive. The preformated disk was with 4 partions C: 420gb and D: Recovery, E: HP Tools and a system partition with no letter assigned to it.

I wanted of course to shrink C and make a separate partion for all my documents (G:)

I followed your instructions with these steps:

1. I shrink C: (Diskmanagement allowed me to shrink about 219 GB) which I did.
2. I got the unallocated space in the middle (now 219 GB )
3. I right clicked on it and choose create simple volume and wizard came up.
4. I followed the wizard and choose NTFS format quick and assigned to G: as wizard suggest.
5. When executed all my partitions now turned from primary partitions to Dynamic types and the color turned from blue to greenish.

What did I do wrong?

I also noticed (which really scares me) that now I can't access some folders in C: !!!
Some of them have a lock on (for instance Document and settings)

Please help, How do I return to previous state with Primary partitions (blue color) and to be able to access all my folders again?

All the best
Anders

Your problem is that you started out with 4 primary partitions (which is the maximum allowed). You must start with 3 primary and one extended partition. It is kind of unfortunate that HP assigned already 4 partitions.
As a first step you should delete the new partition and hopefully the 4 original partitions will be primaries again. Then you have 2 options:

1. Burn the recovery disks from the recovery partition, backup that partition to an external drive and delete that partition.
2. save the content of the HP tools partition to an external drive and delete that partition.

Now you are left with 3 primaries. Create a new partition as extended partition. See this for details (don't worry that is was written for XP, it is the same in Vista and win7). From there on you can create new simple partitions which will hosted under the extended partition.

PS: I am sure Brink will have more details to add. So wait until he has a chance to respond.

Thanks for your input,

I will wait for Brink too, and see what he suggest. Luckily I burnt recovery discs yesterday (4 DVDs), I suppose if I use them, everything should turn up as the same state when I opened the Computer for the first time?

But I will wait first before I do anything, and see What Brink suggest too.

Anyway your suggestions sounds good to me. Thank you for your suggestions and reply.

All the best
Anders

Thank you both for your suggestions.

I ask for precaution first, do I delete G: (that was once large C:) by rightclicking and choose delete?

Hi again,
No luck here. When I deleted G: it just turn up as unallocated space (black) and the original partitions are still green. Is there more options like system restore or I use those recovery DVDs (4 total) I made yesterday?
I presume That the content on those disc are only C: what happens to the other partitions (dynymic)?

Is there a third option like third party software? I really want to go back to the state my laptop was yesterday with Basic disc and primary partitions..

Thank you for your help, and please suggest what you think.

Sorry If I spam you with questions (I'm really nervous here not to loose data or possibilities to go back)
Q2:What happens now if I expand C: ?