Help with disk management

I recently acquired a Dell Studio XPS 435 desktop with Vista Ultimate as the OS. My plan is to upgrade to Windows 7 in the next couple of months or so. Therefore I won't need the Vista recovery partition on the hard drive. I am trying to eliminate it and add to the C: drive partition. Looking at my drive 0 in disk management I have from Right to left a C: partition 683Gb NTFS with the usual Healthy (System, Boot, Page File, Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition). Directly to the left is the Recovery or D: drive which is 15Gb NTFS marked Healthy (Primary Partition) and finally to the left is the last partition of 71Mb marked Healthy (EISA Configuration). No idea what that is. Right clicking in the Recovery partition gives several options including: format, shrink volume, extend volume, delete volume, mark volume as active, change drive letter and paths, as well as help.

My question is how to remove the recovery partition and then extend the C: partition. My first thought is to format the recovery partition, delete the volume and then right click the C: drive partition and extend it but I really need some advice so I don't screw up the whole disk. For instance I have no idea what if anything hapens to the drive letters.I think maybe what I am calling partitions are really volumes so you can see I am over my head here. Any help will be very much appreciated.

Bob

Hello Bob, and welcome to Vista Forums.

If you have not already, then I would recommend that you create a set of recovery discs from your partition for the "Vista Recovery Disc" and "Applications and Driver Disc". This way you can reinstall Vista on your computer if you ever decided to later. Once you delete the recovery paritions, you will not be able to without these discs.

Dell - Support


The easiest way to do this is to wait until you are doing a clean install of Windows 7. During the install of Windows 7, you can select and delete all partitions on the drive to have only one large C: drive partition again. Steps 7 and 8 in the tutorial below is the part during the installation that you would do this at.

Clean Install Windows 7 - Windows 7 Forums

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Thanks for the reply and the welcome Shawn. I should have mentioned that I had made several disk image backups using Acronis 2009. I did NOT however make the recovery set of disks but I will now thanks to your mentioning it. I never know if I might lose the images but the disks will be kept safe.

I had not planned on doing a clean install this time around. The machine being so new and I have not deleted nor had any problems with it at all so I thought I could get away with an in place upgrade. I guess I will have to rethink that if I want to delete the D: partition and add to the C drive. My biggest worry with the upgrade was what Microsoft was going to do with my Windows Mail since I have read that there is no email program in Windows 7. Sure hate to lose all my mail. Back to the drawing board.

Thanks again for the quick reply. You probably saved me some grief!

Bob

sky44 said:

Thanks for the reply and the welcome Shawn. I should have mentioned that I had made several disk image backups using Acronis 2009. I did NOT however make the recovery set of disks but I will now thanks to your mentioning it. I never know if I might lose the images but the disks will be kept safe.

I had not planned on doing a clean install this time around. The machine being so new and I have not deleted nor had any problems with it at all so I thought I could get away with an in place upgrade. I guess I will have to rethink that if I want to delete the D: partition and add to the C drive. My biggest worry with the upgrade was what Microsoft was going to do with my Windows Mail since I have read that there is no email program in Windows 7. Sure hate to lose all my mail. Back to the drawing board.

Thanks again for the quick reply. You probably saved me some grief!

Bob

Click to expand...

Sky

win 7 doesnt include an email client but windows live mail (sucessor to windows mail) is included in wndows live essentials. Its pretty similar to windows mail and you can import your messages and rules into it

ken

You can save your email messages and contacts as well using the tutorials below to backup everything in Vista Windows Mail first, then restoring it in Windows Live Mail in Windows 7.

Windows Live Mail - Import Windows Mail Messages - Windows 7 Forums

and

Windows Live Mail - Import Vista Contacts and Contact Groups - Windows 7 Forums

Thanks Ken and Shawn for the Live Mail information. Sounds like the way to go. That has bugged me since I first heard there was no email with Windows 7. Actually I could change that over now IF I decide to avoid a clean install upgrade. I would have to live with 15Gb of my drive unusable but it is a big drive........Hmmm. Always decisions and compromises aren't there?

Thanks again to both of you.

Bob

sky44 said:

Thanks Ken and Shawn for the Live Mail information. Sounds like the way to go. That has bugged me since I first heard there was no email with Windows 7. Actually I could change that over now IF I decide to avoid a clean install upgrade. I would have to live with 15Gb of my drive unusable but it is a big drive........Hmmm. Always decisions and compromises aren't there?

Thanks again to both of you.

Bob

Click to expand...

Bob

You really want to do a clean install. I know its a PITA but you clen out all the junk from the old OS. you can always import you files and settings but make sur you have a backup in case

ken