Windows Drive Issues

[guddler]

Can anyone help me with this? I think I know what I've got to do but not 100% sure.

I've just been on a remote assistance session with my nephew and he's ended up with a bit of an odd drive setup. It's because he installed a pre-release version of Windows 8 that couldn't be upgraded to RC, so he's ended up with two copies, one of which he never boots any more and he wants to delete the partition and recover the space. All of that would be easy enough, but his system partition is showing as being on the partition he wants to zap.

SO, consider the following:

The labels speak for themselves...

Dunno where drive G cam from, though I it may have been when Windows 7 was installed. I built his PC last Xmas but frankly I can't remember. Drive 'D' is the one he wants to lose and drive 'C' the one he's using day to day.

As you can see, 'D' is flagged as 'System' and 'Active' and hence can't just be deleted.

What are the steps?

I can submit a screenshot of the dos window, but for now take my word for it that all the env vars for windows are pointing to C not D. The active page file is on C and so is the hiberfile and sleep file.

I'm also assuming they're going to have to bring the PC to me to do as they're two hours drive away and I don't think I'll be able to do this remotely.

Thanks in advance...

 

[Purity]

I think delete D, and G and then merge into 1 partition?

EDIT: Just noticed D is System and Active so forget that
Purity2012-12-31 21:53:35

 

[guddler]

Yeah, that's the point of the question really, I get delete D, G can stay I guess - doesn't make a lot of odds really as it's only small - but the problem is how to shift the system bit off of D so that it will let men delete D

Sometimes Windows is too damn clever for it's own good!

 

[Purity]

Try this

 

[guddler]

Hmm, not 100% sure if that link is what I want or not as the OP says he's fixed his problem in the second post and everyone then goes on to talk about resizing and moving partitions when the one you want isn't at the start of the disk - which I know how to do.

BUT, from some of the links and stuff in there, it sounds like what I need to do is the same as I've done before with my own system. That is, boot from something like GPARTED live CD and delete the unwanted partition. The system will now be un-bootable, but I should be able to boot from a Windows 8 disk and repair it with the command line based recovery tools (the exact procedure of which is a whole separate subject!).

I'd be an awful lot happier if this was dealing with separate disks so I could just remove one, then repair - that's how I have things, Win8 Dev on one disk (SATA), Win 8 Gaming on another (SSD) and a final disk for OS X (SATA). The dev disk has an extra partition for data that the two Win 8's share.

So, can anyone agree or disagree on the approach of deleting the unwanted partition and then doing a repair (non-automated), before I go ahead and do it?

I'll have to get the PC to me to do this anyway so it may be some time!

 

[Macro]

Assuming windows 8 has the same repair stuff on the install disk, then what you should be able to do is delete the erroneous partition, after which it probably won't boot.

boot from the windows CD and select repair - it should find the missing boot sector, boot files and sort it all out - be aware though that it only fixes one problem at a time, so you will probably need to boot from the CD 3 times in total

after that it should have repaired everything and it will boot from the disk as usual!

I've done it a couple of times with windows 7 when I swopped drives and changed the number of partitions I had - no command line trickery needed!
Macro2013-01-01 23:04:38

 

[guddler]

Cheers - that kind of agrees with what I think so I guess that's what we'll run with and see how it goes. Whenever my cousin can get the PC down to me that is

No way am I going to try and talk him through that remotely!

 

[Alpha1]

You can also add the disk to another machine and delete the system partition, and then put it back in again and run the repair wizard (which should be just the once).