[lilxkid24]

I have windows vista and i was just messing around to partition the hd today so I did it and it came up with 70gigs. Now i want to unpartition it and have it back to the original but i dont know how. I heard i need some sort of windows disk but have no clue what to do. Darn the old firefox spellcheck was better than this ms word spellchecker lol

[smax013]

lilxkid24 said:

I have windows vista and i was just messing around to partition the hd today so I did it and it came up with 70gigs. Now i want to unpartition it and have it back to the original but i dont know how. I heard i need some sort of windows disk but have no clue what to do. Darn the old firefox spellcheck was better than this ms word spellchecker lol

I am not sure how much help I will be as I don't yet have my Vista upgrade installed, so I don't have any direct experience with Vista. But, I have gotten the impression from rgreen's posts about Vista that it does have the built-in ability to do non-destructive partitioning. And this document tend to support that. I would assume that if you go to Disk Management that there is a way to delete the partition (make sure that you get all the files off it that you want to keep before you do that) and then expand the "base" partition to fill the whole disk. I did not see any specific instructions on how to do it in that document, but it did kind of imply that you could do so from Disk Management.

[lilxkid24]

i know i deleted the drive off already but on disk management it says i have 70gig free space left. Then i click delete partitiion but it says this is an extended partition. The partitionwill become in accessible if you delete it. Are you sure you want to delete this partition. If i click yes will i get the 70gigs back on my c drive or will it be gone forever?

[smax013]

lilxkid24 said:

i know i deleted the drive off already but on disk management it says i have 70gig free space left. Then i click delete partitiion but it says this is an extended partition. The partitionwill become in accessible if you delete it. Are you sure you want to delete this partition. If i click yes will i get the 70gigs back on my c drive or will it be gone forever?

I will say that I honestly don't know what will happen for sure. I do know that if you delete that partition, then that partition and any data on it will be gone. Whether or not that 70 gb gets automatically joined backup to the C: partition or if you have to complete some sort of command to get the C: partition to expand to fill the entire drive, I don't know for sure. I am betting that it will not be "gone forever". If you delete the partition, it should either be made into unallocated/unpartitioned space or the C: drive will automatically extend to fill the space. If it is the former, then there should be a command to cause the C: partition to fill the space.

[mphenterprises]

If I can add a point. I haven't installed Vista as of yet so I am running on assumptions just like Smax. However, I know that 3rd party applications like GParted or Partition Magic will let you unpartition space. Now, I do not know if either has a version compatible with Vista but it is worth a shot.

[lilxkid24]

il wait for a responce for rgreen since he has more knowledge of vista B-)

[lilxkid24]

I heard of those programs but theres no way in hell am i paying 50 bucks to use one of them.

[mphenterprises]

Gparted is free....http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php

[smax013]

mphenterprises said:

If I can add a point. I haven't installed Vista as of yet so I am running on assumptions just like Smax. However, I know that 3rd party applications like GParted or Partition Magic will let you unpartition space. Now, I do not know if either has a version compatible with Vista but it is worth a shot.

According to the Symantec site, Norton PartitionMagic 8.0 is listed as being Vista compatible. While I don't really like Symantec products much anymore, Symantec has not seemed to muck up PartitionMagic too much yet (it was owned by another company that Symantic bought out). I have PartitionMagic 8.0. I have used it on my drives and it is the basis of how I am assuming the built-in Vista functionality might work. If I recall correctly (it has been a while since I needed to partition stuff), PartitionMagic will not automatically "join" recently deleted partition space with another partition. You have to tell it to do that.

[lilxkid24]

just for the heck of it im going to delete the partition. If it doenst show up on c drive or whatever il reformat then

[lilxkid24]

oops this might be a difference



The partitionwill become in accessible if you delete it. Are you sure
you want to delete this partition. If i click yes will i get the 70gigs
back on my c drive or will it be gone forever?




its INACCESSIBLE not accessible lo.

[rgreen4]

lilxkid24 - Intellectual Intrigue (I love that phrase) dictated that I try it before I responded. Obviously you have been in disk management which allows you to shrink a volume and then format the unallocated space with a different volume letter. I did not use my boot drive, but the Personal Media Drive which is USB connected.
The drive volume was originally designated as P: and it is a 300GB volume. Shrinking the volume gave me two 150 GB volumes, the original P: which is now 150GB, and the unallocated 150GB space, which I formatted and became J: Then right clicking on P: I get the same pop up menu that I used to shrink the volume, but now a previously greyed out option is available - Extend Volume. Selecting this you can move 150GB P: to cover the unallocated space and now you have a 300GB volume called P:
Discretion dictated that I back up the drive before the experiment, and checking the properties after shrinking and expanding to the backed up volume shows that it has gained some! The original occupied space was 49,176KB, the after shrinking and expanding was 49,313.

[lilxkid24]

im a bit lost lol i right clicked all of them and none give me the option to extend volume

[smax013]

rgreen4 said:

lilxkid24 - Intellectual Intrigue (I love that phrase) dictated that I try it before I responded. Obviously you have been in disk management which allows you to shrink a volume and then format the unallocated space with a different volume letter. I did not use my boot drive, but the Personal Media Drive which is USB connected.

The drive volume was originally designated as P: and it is a 300GB volume. Shrinking the volume gave me two 150 GB volumes, the original P: which is now 150GB, and the unallocated 150GB space, which I formatted and became J: Then right clicking on P: I get the same pop up menu that I used to shrink the volume, but now a previously greyed out option is available - Extend Volume. Selecting this you can move 150GB P: to cover the unallocated space and now you have a 300GB volume called P:

Discretion dictated that I back up the drive before the experiment, and checking the properties after shrinking and expanding to the backed up volume shows that it has gained some! The original occupied space was 49,176KB, the after shrinking and expanding was 49,313.

I figured it would be something like that...a command to "expand" or extend the remaining partition to fill the entire drive...just did not have Vista up and running to test it out myself.

And I DEFINITELY second the notion that one should backup before doing the process. In theory, such partitioning programs are non-destructive and you should be able to do such operations without losing data (unless you are DELETING a paritiont that is), but ANY time you mess with a drive (this includes defragging if you ask me) you should backup first. Mr. Murphy of Murphy Law tends to like messing up your drive when you do major operations to it and DON'T back it up! ;-)

[lilxkid24]

i have nothing on that new drive so theres nothing to back up lol

[rgreen4]

Ok, from the disk management window only, the upper section lists all the volumes. It is important to understand the difference in volume and disk. You may have one disk, but can have many volumes on that disk. The lower section has a ribbon for each disk, and shows the volumes across that disk.



Partitioning C: then gives us this view:



Placing your cursor on the formatted volume c: and right clicking should give you a pull down menu with:
Open
Explore
Mark Partition as active
Format
Extend Volume
Shrink Volume
Delete Volume
Properties
Help

You will only get active choices for most on a formatted volume. If the space is unallocated the Extend/Shrink/Delete options will be greyed out.

If this is not what you see, post an image of what your disk management window looks like. Vista has a snipping tool in Accessories menu (All Programs ->Accessories ->Snipping Tool. This will allow you to clip a section of the screen, save it a a JPG file and upload and post in the forum. That is how I did these. However, the pull down menus disappear as soon as you activate the snipping tool, so I had to manually list the options.

[lilxkid24]

http://i209.photobuc...lxkid24/par.jpg

Thats what i see. Mark partition as active,format,extend volume and delete volume are greyed out on my c drive.

[smax013]

lilxkid24 said:

http://i209.photobuc...lxkid24/par.jpg


Thats what i see. Mark partition as active,format,extend volume and delete volume are greyed out on my c drive.

What options do you get when you right-click on the green "free space"? Did you delete the partition? It looks like it is still a partition, just unformatted. You need to get it so that green "free space" becomes "unallocated". Then the option to expand the C: partition should appear I believe.

[rgreen4]

lilxkid24 - the reason you don't have any choices on volume C: (and I guess its time for us to get used to calling them volumes not drives) on drive 0, is that all the available space on drive 0 is committed. Since drive 0 is your boot drive, please don't do anything else to it until I have a chance to do some more experimentation. Since my drive 0 is a clone of the master (stored in the closet), if I blow it, no harm will be done. If for some reason, your drive 0 becomes inacessible, you might be up the unsanitary tributary without visible means of transportation. And of course Murphy is always waiting to put us there.

It will probably be 4-5 PM PDT before I get a chance to do testing. I also have the luxury of being able to put the drive in my old XP machine and use Seagate's Diskwizard to completely refurbish the drive. Diskwizard is one of those nice utilities that don't run in Vista, on the premise that it's not needed with the new capability of Disk Management. We shall find out.

BTW - I have signed up for photobucket, I was disappointed in the resolution of the screen clips when I uploaded them. On my HD, they look fine. I will also attempt to edit my previous post this evening to substitute links for the uploads.

[smax013]

rgreen4 said:

BTW - I have signed up for photobucket, I was disappointed in the resolution of the screen clips when I uploaded them. On my HD, they look fine. I will also attempt to edit my previous post this evening to substitute links for the uploads.

Actually, if you click on your images, then they open up in another "window" and their resolution is fine.