Shrinking C: partition will not free up space on hdd

[The Metal God]

Some facts:

Acer Laptop.

The owner has used the Acer eRecovery tool to make a a recovery-dvd before any changes/installations to the system. (this was pre sp1)

After some time he decided to wipe out the D: partition and expand the c: partiton on the unallocated space.

He then desided to test W7 on the laptop, but changed his mind shortly after. (he wanted to use the license on another pc)

He then performed recovery from the recovery-image (dvd), and booted up Vista.

Almost everything seemd to work out fine exept that the installation program for the Acer programs halts when trying to install Acer eRecovery. (i dont know if this has to do with the missing D: partition?)

Second symptom: When trying to shrink the C: partition (to free up space for a new D: partition), the shrinking prosess works out fine, but the unallocated space on the harddrive will not show up. Nothing at all... Take a look at this:

Screendump

(This is an 160GB hdd)

As you can see there is missing 40-50GB harddrive space!!

He has confirmed that sp1 and updates installs fine btw.

Any ideas whats causing this problems?

Sorry my lausy english guys

Edited August 30, 2009 by The Metal God

[jaclaz]

Theoretically a "recovery DVD" should do a Recovery, i.e. NO matter what is on the hard disk make it exactly as it were at the time the "snapshot" was taken.

But there should have been also a "base recovery DVD" (if not given together with the PC) capable of restoring to "factory", including the hidden partition.

Is it possible that user completed only a part of the creating "recovery DVD"?

i.e. by snapshotting only his "user" partiton and not the hidden one?

The whole thing about this "stupid" procedure is a logic loophole, you do a "backup" and the only way to test if it went allright and it works is by testing it overwriting your current working partition(s).

If for any reasons something went wrong when saving, you cannot restore properly and you are stuck.

jaclaz

[The Metal God]

But there should have been also a "base recovery DVD" (if not given together with the PC) capable of restoring to "factory", including the hidden partition.

I Know

Don't have a clue wat he have tried and his "skills" at making a recovery dvd ( guess this is the first and only recovery-image he has made ).

I will ask him to perform a recovery from hiden partition if possible. Will come back with update as soon as i can

[The Metal God]

Ok.

The pc owner didn't do the recovery as i suggested for him, but instead he installed W7 on the c: partition. Still the same problem!

He says he managed to shrink c: a little more, but still no unallocated space shows up in the disk manager tool....

This should tell us that the problem is "outside" the system-partition?

Could this have something to do with a faulty master boot record or somthing like that? ( i dont have a clue, just guessing )

(MBR contains the partition table if i understand things right)

Edited August 31, 2009 by The Metal God

[jaclaz]

Could this have something to do with a faulty master boot record or somthing like that? ( i dont have a clue, just guessing )

(MBR contains the partition table if i understand things right)

Yes it could, but I wonder WHAT could have caused it.

I mean, a problem may be that of "overlapping" partitions, i.e. partitions that extend in the partition entries in the MBR over other partitions.

The result would be the opposite to the one you are referring to, i.e. there would be apparently more space used by the sum of single partitions than the one actually totally available.

Or maybe this happened before and this shrinking actually corrected values?

Another possibility is that for any reason, the first partition (9.76 Gb one in the screenshot, with NO letter assigned) instead of starting "normally" at CHS 0/1/1 or LBA 64 starts after some 60 Gb from the beginning of the stick?

What you can do is check with a tool like beeblebrox:

http://students.cs.byu.edu/~codyb/

and or a Hex editor (advised tiny hexer + my Structure viewers for it):

http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=8734

http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?...c=8734&st=8

If the MBR is "kosher".

To simplify life, you may ask your friend/customer to use this app:

HDHACKER

http://dimio.altervista.org/eng/

to save the MBR (First sector of PhysicalDrive #0)

and send it to you (and if you want you can post it and I'll have a look at it)

jaclaz

[The Metal God]

Thank you for a clarifying answer.

This is a topic from an Norwegian forum, and i did find the discussion on this so interesting that i desided to ask for help here at msfn.org....

------------------------

I suspect that this may be the reason for missmatching MBR partition table vs actual disk structure:

4. The special Acer Master Boot Record (MBR) has become corrupt or has been overwritten with an non Acer MBR. As long as the PQSERVICE partition is there or you can get your hands on a couple of Acer service files for your model, then you can remake the special Acer MBR. Let’s cover how this is done.

From: http://www.roundtripsolutions.com/blog/200...ecovery-broken/

Have in mind that the D:partition is removed from the hardrive while the Acer eRecovery tool always will write a mbr partitiontable for the factory-configuration of the laptop... ( with C:, D: and PQSERVISE partition)

From comment under the article:

Weblog Says:

March 2nd, 2008 at 3:59 pm

@Polo: The instructions we have on this blog post are about as much as we know. We’re not Acer agents and have never supplied such “cheap” system, prefering to go with high quality alternatives.

Combining your C & D partition will result in D2D NOT working. It expects to see a certain partition structure, in fact, the one that it left the factory with!

I'm not sure what will be the next steps, but thank you again for the replyes and the toolstips we got from you jaclaz

I have posted link in the Norwegian forum to this topic btw..

Edited August 31, 2009 by The Metal God

[jaclaz]

Two notes:

1. while beeblebrox is Freeware, PTEDIT32 licensing status is UNKNOWN (but you don't need to subscribe to the forum, it can be found on symantec's FTP), see here:
   http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/BootToolsRefs.htm
   
2. the PQSERVICE partition is "typical" (besides ACER, which I didn't know about) of DELL's, for which very interesting notes/methods exist:
   http://www.goodells.net/dellutility/index.htm
   http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/index.htm
   Of course how much of the above apply to the ACER is for you to find out, your mileage may vary.
   

jaclaz