question with Unallocated space

Have a little problem to claim the Unallocated space to partition D

I was restoring a vista image, when i got a problem that the partitions was misnamed. Logged in with temp profile and had to correct the partition names in the registry.

wanted to increase the size of D, but seems the former error is a problem.
cant claim the space made from the C partition.

 

mango:

Could you post a different screen shot from Disk Director like the first picture shown in this thread? You can do this by starting DD in manual mode so that you see the graphic illustration of the current partition layout. This picture will answer a lot of questions.

Also, do I understand correctly that you would like to add all of the unallocated space to the D partition?

 

yes, unallocated space to the D partition.

 

OK. The devil is in the details, so a couple of more questions would help me avoid causing you problems.

1. From your picture, the C partition is active, so am I correct to assume that Vista is installed in the C partition?
2. What is in the D partition?
3. Do you have any other operating systems (like XP) installed on this disk?
4. What is in the small 39 MB primary partition at the end of the disk?

Once I understand what you have on the disk, it should be pretty easy to accomplish your objective.

 

Thanks.

1.vista is installed on C
2.D partition is storage and used for "my documents"
3 no other OS installed
4. The small partition at the end is efi, and used for asus boot booster (bypass the asus at startup)


i had error when restoring vista from image.

Before restoring i had the main C and D partitions and restored image to C.

After the restore D partition was first in explorer, if that makes any sense.

So was logged in with temp profile. Had to open task manager and start explorer.exe and change drive letters in registry

 

mango:

Good. This will be relatively simple to do. However, I have to go now but will post back here later today with the procedure.

 

mango:

There are a number of ways to do this, but here is one that should work. Depending on which version of TI you have, there may be easier ways but the following should work without dependence on your TI version.

A. Back up your entire disk with TI first
B. Eventually we will be moving the partition that Vista is installed to, so you will need to plan ahead. We want to do two things - first, make the Vista BCD independent of location so that you can move the Vista partition around without needing a BCD repair afterward. Second, since Windows will reassign drive letters when you reboot into Vista the first time, we want to make sure that the Vista partition gets the C drive letter.

But first, let's get the data partition moved out of the way. Refer to your graphic below:



The objective here is to move the Vista partition to the beginning of the disk. You will get better disk performance if you put the OS there, followed by your data. So when we finish you will have three partitions in this order: C, D, EFI. Since there isn't much data on the D partition presently, do this:

1. In Disk Director, create a new partition in the 28.99 GB unallocated space. Make it a primary NTFS partition. After creating this partition, use Windows Explorer to copy all of the files on the D partition to the new partition. Make sure that you display hidden files so that they are included in the copy.

You will probably now have partitions C, D, and E. To force Windows to assign C and D to the final set of partitions, go into the registry and delete the entries in the registry key HKLM\System\MountedDevices for the DosDevices C, D, and E. Windows will reassign them on its next boot.

To fix the BCD so that you will not need a repair after moving the Vista partition, do the steps in this article. Also, look at post #102 in the article for an additional step.

For the rest of the operations you need to boot the DD recovery CD and do them when Windows is not running.

2. First, delete the 55.02 GB partition. Click on the checkered flag to commit. You should now have unallocated space to the left of the C partition.
3. Right-click on the C partition and choose "Resize". Click on the center of the graphic and drag the whole partition to the left until it is at the beginning of the disk. Commit this operation. Now you will have unallocated space between C and D.
4. Right-click on the 28.99 GB partition and choose "Resize". Drag the partition to the left and drag the right resize handle to the right until the partition has no unallocated space either before or after, thus making it the maximum possible size. Commit this operation.
5. Reboot into Windows and check. Vista should get assigned drive letter C and the data partition should get assigned drive letter D. If the latter is incorrect, use Vista Disk Management to fix it.

Hopefully this will get you fixed up.

 

thanks, ill try tomorrow.

What about merging D with C ? Then create a new partition

Or delete D, but will C find the free space?

 

I would avoid using Disk Director's "Merge" function - it's an accident waiting to happen. Yo do a merge the program first tries to copy all of the data from D into C. Then it tries to expand C. But who knows what you'll end up with; the D partition is a logical partition and the C partition is primary; what will DD do? For one thing it won't adjust the registry entries so that you end up with the correct drive letters when Windows reboots and it won't modify Vista's BCD so that Vista can boot; you would have to fix those manually after doing the merge operation.

I wouldn't take the chance; do it manually so that you know what will happen. The procedure that I put in my previous post is the manual equivalent of a "merge" but done methodically so that you are sure of the outcome.

If you simply delete D you will end up with a bunch of unallocated space in front of C. You will be doing that as part of the procedure, but followed up by moving C.

 

thanks.

That seems to have sorted it all out.


I did also get the boot error after reinstalling image with vista, and had to do a repair.

in the thread you mentioned with Vista BCD, can this be used on the image already made so theres no need to repair vista after reinstall?

Or maybe make a new image now, since i have done the steps

bcdedit /set {default} device boot <ENTER>
bcdedit /set {default} osdevice boot <ENTER>
bcdedit /set {bootmgr} device boot <ENTER>
bcdedit /set {memdiag} device boot <ENTER>


I think the previous image i used was just of the C.


So whats the best way of making an image\restoring vista without the boot error at startup?

 

You've got it. Your Vista BCD now has all of its references to the active (boot) partition. So if you make an image of your current Vista disk, or even just the Vista partition, as long as you restore the image to the active partition on the disk you will not need a repair.

Glad that worked out for you.