vista home disk management

Hi...
A friend has an oldish 80 gig acer laptop.It has one hard drive c: at 35 gigs and a d: drive partition at 35 gigs showing when you click my computer.He had been backing up all his c:files etc to the dartition.He now has an external drive and has backed up everything to that,and now wants to remove the dartition and make it part of C:
1.
To accomplish this in disk management would the D: partition have to be deleted or shrunk? ,and would the space automatically be added to c: or would something else have to be done?
2.
Also ive noticed in disk management it also shows another 10 gig (partition?)with no label under file system (i.e not showing ntfs or fat) and under status tab it reads "healthy (EISA configuration) with 100% free under %tab.What is this "partition" thats taking up 10 gigs?,that doesnt show under my computer?.I have simialr "phantom" partition in my vista laptop ,however it only takes up 39 meg.
any help /advice would be appreciated
tia
ellison

 

You can use Vista's Disk Management to accomplish this. You will need to delete the D: partition and then extend the C: partition to add the deleted space to C:. I have had some problems in the past when trying to extend a volume because the free space was not contiguous. I used Perfect Disk to defrag and consolidate free space and then had no problems. Of course, it is always a good idea to make an image backup just in case something goes wrong when removing/re-sizing partitions.

My first thought on the other 10 gig partition is that it is a service partition to restore the OS, but I am not sure why it would show as 100% free.

 

Thanks for the tips on how to accomplish the resizing.Regarding the 10 gig "partition" i thought it may be recovery too ,however that usually shows when you click my computer (at least my recovery partition shows on my machine).This "partition" is like a phantom one as it only shows under disk management and doesn't have a file system not NTFS or FAT which i assume would have to be the case if it was recovery?
ellison

 

I am going from memory here as I have deleted the recovery partition on my laptop. I remember for sure that on my laptop the recovery partition was hidden and only showed under disk management. It was definitely not visible when clicking on My Computer. As for lacking a file system designation...I am not sure. I do recall that it showed as 100% used rather than free.

I think it has to be a recovery partition unless your friend somehow managed to create this partition on their own.

 

The partition in question is the recovery partition that is named PQSERVICE. While Vista's disk management does not show the name of this partition usually backup programs will identify it. The example below is from my Acer laptop (my desktop is set up the same way) and using the WHS backup configuration window to identify this partition:

 

Thanks to you both for the help.
@midway.....could you possibly check in disk management whether the recovery partition is actually showing a file system?.Im not sure how a partition can show without a file type system?
tia
ellison

 

A good question which I did not know the answer to. I googled around and found some references to PQSERVICE being a 12h type diagnostic partition. I then found this list of partition identifiers in which 12h isn't listed. Because of this, maybe Windows cannot identify this partition. I am willing to bet though that it is a FAT partition since it is a favorite of diagnostic partitions.

 

Looks to me like the 12h type partition IS listed in your link. (unless I am misreading something)

12 Configuration/diagnostics partition
ID 12 (decimal 1 is used by Compaq for their configuration utility partition. It is a FAT-compatible partition (about 6 MB) that boots into their utilities, and can be added to a LILO menu as if it were MS-DOS. (David C. Niemi) Stephen Collins reports a 12 MB partition with ID 12 on a Compaq 7330T. Tigran A. Aivazian reports a 40 MB partition with ID 12 on a 64 MB Compaq Proliant 1600. ID 12 is used by the Compaq Contura to denote its hibernation partition. (dan@fch.wimsey.bc.ca)

NCR has used ID 0x12 MS-DOS partitions for diagnostics and firmware support on their WorldMark systems since the mid-90s. DataLight's ROM-DOS has replaced MS-DOS on more recent systems. Partition sizes were once 72M (MS-DOS) but are now 40M (ROM-DOS).

Intel has begun offering ROM-DOS based "Service Partition" support on many OEM systems. This support initially used ID 0x98 but has recently changed to ID 0x12. Intel provides their own support for this partition in the form of a System Resource CD. Partition size has remained constant at 40M. See e.g. sds2.pdf. (Chuck Rouillard)

IBM also uses 0x12 for its Rescue and Recovery partition on Thinkpad laptops. See also thinkwiki.org.