How can a partition my drive to achieve this objective...

I have a 320gb HDD that came with my M17xR3. It has a 10 GB restore partition and the rest has the OS on it. I have replaced this drive with an SSD and Hybrid storage drive. I want to use the old 320GB drive as an external HDD via E-SATA.

I want to keep the restore partition and the OS for later (resale maintenance etc). Can I create another 3rd partition with the left over space, and then use windows to hide the other 2 partitions? (using disk management or something) Then when I want the other 2 back, I can delete the 3rd data storage partition and un-hide the other two.

Will this work?

 

not quite understand your 'objective' as you are kind of describing the 'process'. what is your objective ?

 

You could just burn restore DVD's and use that to reimage the HDD before you plan to sell it, and in the meantime just wipe the drive and use it as you see fit.

I haven't had much luck in creating additional partitions on a factory shipped HDD with a restore partition and keeping the recovery partition in a working state, but I'm sure its possible, just didn't seem like it was worth the effort to me

 

My goal is to use my original 320GB HDD as a data drive, while at the same time maintain BOTH the Restore parition, and the original Factory OS. Currently the drive is partitioned 10GB Recovery and the Rest is Windows 7 (300GB +/-). I would want to take that 300GB partition, resize it to 280 +/-, so that 20GB still contains windows 7, and the other 280GB is empty. Then I would "hide" the 10GB restore partition, and the 20GB windows partition, and basically have a 280GB drive for everyday use. Then if I want the drive back to factory spec, I delete the 280GB data partition, unhide the windows 7 partition, extend it into the extra 280gb partition, and everything SHOULD be back to normal. RIGHT?

Does this make any sense?

Hey I am in Las Vegas also. Yeah I could do that, but I wanted to see if there was a way to keep the restore partition and the OS. That way if I did want the laptop back to factory, all I would have to do is delete and un-hide some partitions. Your way would work, but Alienware has a crazy restore system, if you don't have the restore disks or the original OS is messed up (as in deleted) the restore partition will not work at all. This is kinda messed up IMHO. Asus let me delete everything except the recovery partition, use it is a data drive, and then when I wanted it back to factory, one hit of F8 and few mouse clicks later and everything was back to factory. Not so with Alienware.

 

since you want to use it as a data drive, i would say just format the existing system partition for that purpose. Or not even formatting, just put your stuff under say 'mydata'.

In the future, you can just make use of the system restoration feature to put back a factory copy of Windows 7 on to it, if you ever want.

My Windows 7 doesn't even see my vendor's system restoration partition.

Don't see a need to monkey around. Use as it is or format the partition(as you can always restore it, that is what the hidden vendor partition is for).

EDIT:
I mean windows 7 doesn't see my vendor reserved partition as a 'drive', it is there under disk management.

 

You can achieve what you want, but like others I wonder why you wanna keep the Windows OS partition at all. I have kept the recovery partition (in addition to the recovery discs I burned) and instead have created an image of my completed windows build, so in the event of a catastrophe I can restore to factory state then restore that windows image.

But if you wanna keep the recovery and windows partitions, you can hide them using disk manager (control panel > admin tools > computer management > disk management). You can resize the existing partitions to give you the space you want then "deactivate" the old windows partition and remove its drive letter so it will become hidden.