Need help removing Recovery Partition.

Alright,

I've got an XPS M1730. I plan to do a clean install later on down the road, but for the time being I would be happy with removing this recovery partition and expanding my vista partition over it.

Essentially what happens is I can delete the recovery partition, but the vista built in partition tool will not allow me to expand the "c" or vista partition, only shrink it.

I did this with the first laptop i had (M1730 w/ 8700 GPU was returned for one with 8800 gpu's). I used GParted and it worked like a charm. I tried it the second time around but GParted is not working for me since this new machine has a raid 0 array and gparted only recongnizes the individual drives (it can't "see" raid drives, my first laptop had a single solid state drive).

Does anyone know of a tool or method that will allow me to expand the vista partition over the deleted recovery partition? I've read all the 3rd party partition tools do not work with vista. They allow pretty much the same functionality as the vista partitioning tool and hang on any paritioning requiring reboot.

If anyone has been successful please throw in a reply.


Thanks.

 

Use the GParted LiveCD, but first backup your data, and you may have to repair your startup before Windows boots, if it boots at all, which is why I said back up your data!

 

I did use gparted, as mentioned. It worked beautifully on my previous laptop, but it won't detect the partitions on a raid array.

Any other work arounds that people have used?

 

You might have to wait until you clean install. Are the 10 GB or so you'd gain absolutely needed right now?

 

No, it's more of a performance thing. Dell places the recovery partition at the optimal spot on the drive and it really irritates me that they've done that.

It's actually causing stutter in my current game of choice (Vanguard). Placing the core OS and programs files further into the drive increases seek times resulting in poorer performance.

This also results in longer boot times. If you ask me, that's probably the stupidest place for them to place it. Had they placed it at the end of the disk (inner most) I wouldn't really care and would probably just keep it on.

I was just looking for a quick fix here so I wouldn't have to rush to reinstall the OS.

 

I agree. Why put the least used data at the fastest part of the hardrive!?

 

Yup, exactly. I'm a little neurotic when it comes to things like this lol.

I have a set way of creating my paritions all based on usage. What dell did here (and have done with their laptops) is probably the worst thing you could possibly do in terms of partition setups.

 

How do you know where the data is placed physically on the hard drive?

If you're looking for a way to increase boot time, see the Vista Tweaks thread, especially tweak # 4 and 16.

 

I'm format mi HD in my M1530 (250Gb), and now I have only:

3Gb media direct.
170Gb OS (vista Ultimate x64).
70GB for files.

If.. you format your HD... and loose de recovery partition... you loose the Dell warranty?

 

You don't void the warranty by deleting the recovery partition.

 

so how exactly do you go about deleting it without a clean install?

 

-Click Start, right click on "Computer" and select "Manage"
-On the left page, click Storage>Disk Management. There you should see all your partitions
-Select the recovery partition, right click and delete
-Use gparted to extend your C:\ partition to use the space left by the deleted recovery partition.

 

Have you tried diskpart.exe in Vista?

It should work using command line execution. Google or check Windows support for command line instructions.

 

Boy, talk about learning something new every day! I had no idea that certain parts of the HD was faster or more efficient! Why is that by the way?

I'm also going to do a clean install today or tomorrow so I can regain my lost 10GB where the recovery use to reside.

 

Uh... I did the first two, but not the gparted part?
How is this done? I'm missing 10GB somewhere...
It shows it with a black bar the top, (not blue) and grey lines in the box and says: "10GB unallocated"

 

gparted is a free progrma to download.

You should be able to right click on the C drive and expand it. If that does not work, try gparted or the Windows command line diskpart.exe.

 

I got the diskpart.exe open, so what do I type in?

 

Here are some instructions on using diskpart.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490893.aspx
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300415
http://onlytech.blogspot.com/2006/06/what-is-diskpartexe-in-microsoft.html

But I'm not sure it can do what you want it to do.

 

Thanks a bunch for the effort... but it looks like it is not for Vista?

Diskpart.exe is a tool introduced by Microsoft, to extend the data volumes in Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows 2003.

Have you or anybody else used it with Vista?

I'm gonna bite the bullet and do a clean install in a few minutes anyway... that will solve it.

 

I haven't used diskpart with Vista, only XP.
It's been a long time since I used it, and I only used it once, so I can't remember exactly what I did.
I do know you can't use it on the partition you're currently booted to.
If you want to use it, you have to use a boot disk (or boot CD).
Good luck with the reformat.

Here's a page with some screenshots of gparted.
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/screenshots.php
I think that would be easier to use.

 

Sorry, gparted is free software that you need to download/install. You can find it here. I recommend you read up how to use it first before trying it by yourself. It's not difficult, but you need to know what you're doing.

 

diskpart.exe works on Vista, also.

The drawback is that it is command line and not GUI driven, so it is a little more involved.