How to get rid of unneeded partition 0.

Hi all,

I am fairly new to this partitioning so please bear with me.

I have an Emachines PC that I got secondhand, it has 2 partitions on it.
The first one is a system recovery partion that I want to delete so I can have its space back, it is formatted as Fat32.
The 2nd partition is the "C" partition, formatted as NTFS.
The boot.ini file has it booting from partition (1), which I guess is the "C" partition?

Can I use True Image Disk Director (10.0.2160) to delete the first "recovery" partition and then give its space to the "C" partition?

Cud someone please explain the steps to me?

When I delete the 1st partition, do I have to make any changes to the boot.ini file and change the value to (0)??

Thanks a bunch!

Cindy

PS: Off topic but how can I change time shown in clock from military (24 HR) time to regular time? If I open the clock icon to full clock it show okay, but when just show time - it is in 24 HR mode??

 

It is perfectly fine to do what you say you want to do. Even that you delete the partition 0, the partition 1 that contains your OS will stay 1.

I have actually posted a thread just couple of weeks ago talking about the difficulty in changing the partition numbers because there is almost no commercially available partitioning programs out there let you do this. Probably because it would create whole lot's of problems.

 

1. Use an imaging tool or similar to save the recovery partition contents, you may want to use it later sometime. Also image the C partition while you're at it just in case something goes wrong.
2. Remember to NEVER modify the system (C) partition while the OS is running, always use the Acronis boot disk for that operation.
3. After starting up the boot disk, select the manual mode rather than automatic mode, its a bit more versatile. Then select the recovery partition and delete it. The first step puts the command into a queue, you must then click on the checkered flag to execute the command. You should now see the recovery partition show up as unallocated.
4. after the recovery partition is unallocated you can now click on the C partition and select the resizing option. Modify the C partition to use all the newly unallocated space. Click on the checkered flag to execute the resizing.

You shouldn't have to. As long as you have the C partition selected as the active partition, nothing else needs to be done. If you ever decide to image the C partition onto a different partition (on the same drive), simply select the new partition you write the image to as active, and remove the active status from the partition you copied the image from. You can't have more than one partition set as active at the same time or the OS won't know what to do.

 

dwalby,

Is the partition number stored in the MBR?

Tnx a bunch,

Cin

 

The short answer to your question is no, but its more complicated than that.

I'm not an expert on the subject, but I've used DD a fair amount, and I did exactly what you want to do a couple weeks ago with DD, so here's what I know.

The MBR contains all the partition information regarding sizes and locations on the hard drive. It has addresses allocated for 4 primary partitions, and a lot more logical partitions (can't recall the exact number). The partition info is organized such that the primary partition numbers are implied by address locations within the MBR. So starting at a pre-defined address, the next X bytes define partition 0, the following X bytes define partition 1, and so on.

What determines the boot partition is something called the active partition flag, which is a single bit in the partition information field. When the system boots it looks in the MBR and determines which partition is defined as active, then boots from that partition. That's why you can only have one partition set as active at a time, otherwise the startup routine gets confused and doesn't know what to do.

In my case I copied (imaged) my system partition into the partition just prior to it on the disk, so I had to uncheck the active box for the partition I copied it from, and check the active box for the partition I copied it into. I'm not sure if Disk Director would complain if you had more than one partition marked as active at the same time, since I never did that, but just make sure you don't have two active partitions at the same time.

If you want to know more details about this search the web, there's lots of info available, but unless you're really technically minded you probably won't be interested.