Posted: 11/27/2009 5:47:47 PM EDT
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Today I installed Windows 7 Home 64 bit in my laptop. One side effect of the installation is my dual boot configuration is gone. My HD is partitioned this way: Windoze 7 in one partition Music, data and pr0n in a larger partition Mint 7 was in a 7.5 gb partition. A side effect of the installation was the grub loader was wiped out along with my ability to access Mint. No big deal, I rarely used it and planned to wipe it off the drive at some point. I need some free open source partition management software to merge the big data partition and the small 7.5gb partition into one. I have EASEUS on another computer, but it won't work with 64 bit systems. I messed around with the Windows disk management. No luck. If there is another way to get this done, I'm open to suggestions. If I have to, I'll fire up the prehistoric Dell desktop and plug the HD into it to get the merge done. I'd rather get a program to do it with the laptop instead of pulling the HD. Thanks in advance. ZM FWIW, the $29.99 student version of Windoze 7 is still available. I dredged up my old college email and the website took it. |
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Haven't dug d deep enough to see if this does what you need or not:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk TestDisk is a powerful free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy. |
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Try Hirens boot disk:
http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd One of those may work on 64 bit but I have never used the disk on a 64 bit machine so im not sure. What restrictions did you run into using the disk management snap in that wouldnt allow you to just format the 7.5 gb volume and then extend the other one utilizing the 7.5g? |
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Quoted: Try Hirens boot disk: http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd One of those may work on 64 bit but I have never used the disk on a 64 bit machine so im not sure. What restrictions did you run into using the disk management snap in that wouldnt allow you to just format the 7.5 gb volume and then extend the other one utilizing the 7.5g? Not sure I understand the question. The current 120gb HD was a backup drive. At that time my main HD crashed and burned. That was right around the same time Windoze 7 Beta came out. At that time, I partitioned the current drive into three partitions on my old desktop using EASEUS and a laptop USB drive enclosure. I sent the dead drive back to WD under warranty. FWIW, WD replaced the old dead 320gb drive with a new 400gb drive. The free version of EASEUS won't work on a 64bit OS. You gotta pay for that. I'm lazy when it comes to computer tasks. I was hoping to find a utility to merge the 7.5gb partition into the big 90gb partition without having to remove the HD or wipe the HD clean and start over. If I was using 32bit Windoze 7, this wouldn't be an issue. I'll probably pull this drive out this weekend, wipe it clean and repartition it the way I want and reinstall Windoze 7. Thanks all ZM |
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Quoted:
Quoted:
Is there a reason Windows can't just extend the existing partition? Only to a certain point No clue what that response means 
Have you tried using the Disk Management snap-in to extend the exiting Basic partition into what should be unused disk space? if it doesn't show up as unused, you should be able to delete that 7.5 GB partitition then recreate it as available space. |
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Quoted: Have you tried using the Disk Management snap-in to extend the exiting Basic partition into what should be unused disk space? if it doesn't show up as unused, you should be able to delete that 7.5 GB partitition then recreate it as available space. Yes I did. Windows wouldn't let me do that. |
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UPDATE: Thanks for all your ideas. I pulled the drive out of my laptop and tried to merge the offending partitions using my wife's laptop. All attempts to merge the partitions failed. Kept getting an error message about something being wrong in the 7.5gb partition. That partition was used for Linux Mint. I'm not sure if that was the problem or not. I have a low tolerance for screwing around with computers so I put the 120gb drive back into my laptop. Plugged in the 400gb USB HD. The 400gb drive has PCLINUX OS 09 on it for use as an emergency HD. I used GParted to wipe the 120gb drive clean and partition it the way I wanted. Now for the fun part. I tried to install Windows 7 home 64 from Digital River. This was the second time I had done this installation in a week. The install should have gone without a hitch. But this time was different, when I tried to activate the license, I got an error message saying that my key code from DR wasn't compatible with the .iso file I downloaded from Digital River. The .iso was an upgrade file....hmmm..... To make a long story short, Google and myself persuaded my computer to accept the key code and properly validate my installation. Nothing shady here. I paid for my license and download. I wasn't willing to wait for the disk from Digital River to show up in the mail. Now everything is running fine. ZM |