M1530 Partition Help

Basically today my download of the Win 7 beta finished, so i had to mess with partitions as i had 4 already taken up. My HDD was in the same state as when i got it, with the partitions: C:/OS, D:/Recovery, ?:/MediaDirect, and ?:/the EISA Configuration one.

I backed up my D Recovery drives in 3 ways (to be sure) with a simple backup to my seagate external, acronis true image'd (then put on external), and Nero backed up (then burnt to dvd).
Anyways, i started up GParted and did the following:
1. Deleted the d drive
2. Resized C approximately 20gb less

So i now have 2 slots of free space, 1 being 10gb, the other 19.53gb.

I then shutdown GParted, and tried to go back into windows, i realised there was a boot up error as Vista wouldn't load, so i put in the OS Reinstallation disc and repaired it, its all fine now.

So now i went into Computer management in Vista and this is what my hdd looks like:


As you can see, the 2 free space slots are not next to each other, which i'm guessing i need them to be. I need help merging those 2 free slots so that i can install Windows 7 on it.

Thanks

 

You can do it within Gparted.

reboot into gparted.

select partition C:

and click move / resize (under the 'partition' drop down menu).

You should get a dialog box with the partition size, and the free space before and after it.

Change the free space before to zero. If the free space is added to C: then increase the free space after to the full 29.53 GB.

Click resize, but don't apply this change yet.

You should now see your C: partition moved to the start, and one block of unallocated space. Select this, and click 'new' The dialog should then allow you to set this as a primary partition, and you should set it to be ntfs. Click 'add' or the equivalent (typing this from memory)

Once you are happy that the new partition sizes / locations are what you want, click apply to actually make the changes. You may need to restore the MBR as you did the first time round to boot into vista.

Links: adding a partition with gparted

resizing partitions


I think it is a good idea to make sure that your new partition is after C: as this should allow you to easily delete, format it and increase C:'s size over the space to remove D: from within Vista's disk management package if you want to get rid of 7. caveat: I haven't tried this, as I put my D: partition before C: and I'm also still happy playing with 7 anyway

Hope this helps

 

Oh, and since your C: is quite big, it may well take a long time to actually move it - on my laptop (only 160GB, C2D 2ghz, 2GB RAM) it took several hours.

 

thanks a lot, i'll do this now, so i'll be back after a few hours (depending how long it takes) and tell what happens.

 

it worked thanks again alasdairs
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