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Partition Question Please


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Hi everyone, I have 160g HD with 4 (40g) partitions.

I purchased XP Pro many years ago and started windows from the CD

and deleted C: and the D: so now I have two un-formatted partitions.

The E: and F: partitions are untouched and need to keep them as

they contain a business programs.

Question how can I combine my C: (39002) and my D: (39002)

and make a partition of 79000.

Many thanks for any assistance.

....Dave

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I purchased XP Pro many years ago and started windows from the CD

and deleted C: and the D: so now I have two un-formatted partitions.

This bit is very ambiguous. First, you can't "start Windows from the cd".

Also, either you formatted C: and D: or you deleted C: and D:. In case you deleted both your question is very easily answered, you have a big unpartitionned space and make one partition that takes all that space.

In case you formatted C: and D:, you (also) just need to delete the two partitions, then recreate one that takes all the freed space. You can do all that from the XP CD.

Note that after reinstallation (I guess that it is your idea), the E: and F: letters will be shifted to D: and E: This can easily be fixed in "Disk Management" (if needed).

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Thanks for the reply, sorry about that, I was reading from the status bar and when installing a fresh copy of XP it installs the necessary files it needs to continue then the status bar mentions "Starting Windows" then the next window is the Partition selection etc. Of course, as you mentioned it's not starting Windows it's just their poorly worded terminology.

Yes, I deleted C: & D: leaving two unpartitioned spaces also leaving the E: & F: intact. Running the XP disk I am not sure how to combine the two unpartitioned spaces.

Any pointers please, Many thanks....

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So you mean C and D were not contiguous ? That is not standard situation so we couldn't guess.

You can use tools like GPartEd (bootable CD or USB drive) to move partitions and so make a contiguous unpartitioned space. It takes quite a long time. Or you could image your 2 remaining partitions to an other drive or external location, repartition your HDD then re-image them on the 1st drive. It is more secure and might be faster but you need to have an imaging program, understand how it works and what it does and have available free space (at least the size of the data on E: and F:) somewhere. There is a sticky about imaging softwares in the "Software" forum.

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Wrote: ..........So you mean C and D we're not contiguous ? That is not standard situation so we couldn't guess.

Not quite sure? ........When I Originally installed Win XP Pro SP2 from the CD I arranged to Partition the hard drive using the software that came with the m/s disk.

4 Partitions each formatted and installed Windows XP on each. This is the only way this poor boy could figure this stuff out :-))

I am totally going to take you advice and download a copy of GPartEd and see how I can save the day or it won't be a big deal to start over again.

I'm sure running GPartEd will show me the way it should have been done.

Many thanks for your help, I'm sure we'll speak again......

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What you describe is not obvious stuff. If you really installed XP on all 4 partitions with "as low knowledge as you claim to have", you 'd have a multiboot of some sort, probabl on the C: drive that you now ...deleted, so with what you describe it is very difficult for us to visualize how your system really runs. Hopefully the few info I gave are enough for you to go on.

Fact is, if you have 4 XP installs, the letters probably do not refer to the same partitions depending what XP is running.

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Thanks for your help. There are not many options using Win XP install disk when partitioning and formatting. The install of XP on each partition give a menu at start up to choose between CDE or F to work with.

I have Gparted running and have six lines.

unallocated - unallocated - 38.09

/dev/sda2 - extended 110.95 - iba

unallocated - unallocated 38.09

/dev/sda5 - ntfs 38.09 - 35.14 used

/dev/sda6 - ntfs 34.78 - 23.88 used

unallocated - unallocated 10.34

The first and third lines I would like to combine but I only get the Resize/Move

to appear on the extended partition. Is this where I would make a larger partiton

from and what size would I use to maximize the partition?

Again, Many thanks for you help

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Now we get it.

You had

1primary partition (C:)

1Extended partition containing 3 logical partitions;

-D: (now empty space), E: and F:

So C: and D: were contiguous in a way but D: was contained in an extended partition, which makes a direct merge impossible.

What you have to do is

-shrink the "Extended Partition" (what you see as 2nd lign in your post) from the beginning (move the left part of the frame that contains E: and F: to the right as far as you can go, that is to the beginning of E:)

-create a new partition in the freed space.

If there is no reason for those lost 10Gig at the end, you can also extend the end of that Extended partition and when you've done that, extend the F: partition so that it includes the free space.

In fact all those operation should not take that long as they wouldn't physically move any data.

Again, I call them C: D: E: and F: to refer to them as you saw them first, but those are names given by Windows. GPartEd won't use those letters and simply show them as partitions or free spaces.

Edited by Ponch
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This has been an interesting project, I need to learn more regards to partitions.

As mentioned the partitioning using the WinXP install disk it's fairly straight forward but ends up being complicated.

Looking at the 4 partition installation I can understand the "Primary" which holds the boot file etc but when setting up

the other three ............why the need for the "Extended" partition that holds the other three logical partitions?

I suppose my question is why the extended and what is it's use?

Would GPartEd use the same procedure?

Following your procedure above I was able to set up a partition of around 79G but was unable to install WinXP.

The WinXP formatted and copied over the set up files but failed the first re-boot. The laptop shut down and on

restart it just sat there with a black screen with cursor blinking in top left corner.

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You need to look at history.

Once upon a time disks were NOT partitioned.

There simply wasn't a FDISK like program in early Operating systems.

The filesystem was (ealry MS-DOS) FAT12 (with a limit of 16 Mb) and simply disks that big did not exist.

But disk sizes grew, and grew....

So you had lot of space but no way to address it fully, and you had to partition the disk.

DOS (which has been for years the "standard") FDISK would allow only one primary partition and one extended partition (with as many logical volumes in it as you like BUT anyway limited to the D-Z range of drive letters)

Then filesystem became FAT16 (with a limit of 32 Mb).

Then came FAT16 but with a much larger 2Gb size limit.

Then NTFS (initially with some limits as well, but of different nature), than FAT32.

Then on NT (windows 2000) mountpoints removed the limit of 24 volumes

And filesystem continued growing in addreesable size up to the current NTFS, the recent exFAT (sometimes called incorrectly FAT64) and the newish ProtogonFS.

For a period of time having one or more logical volumes in an extended partition was simply the ONLY way to use the whole size of a disk drive.

Nowadays it is only a (still IMHO right) choice.

Read here:

http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/

it should clear many of your doubts.

jaclaz

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Reading again I might have jumped to conclusions. :blushing: It's not clear whether for instance the last unalocated bit was inside or out the extended partition. But you should see that on the graphic.

edit;... yes it is, from the numbers, it is inside the extended.

Anyway, run GPartEd again to see if it doesn't give any warning about partitions mismatch. Check that only the 1st partition is active. Have you created that big 79Gig partition with XP or with GParted ? Are you sure your XP is SP2 (or above)?

Edited by Ponch
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  • 2 weeks later...

Thanks for the read Jaclaz.

I had used GParted to move the Extended Partition to expose the second unallocated partition then increased the size of the first unallocated partition to 79Gig.

I tried installing Win XP SP2 and after formatting NTFS and installing the set up files it failed to reboot and went back to the beginning of the install.

I ran GParted and now I have one unallocated partition 149Gig with warning stating that "Can't have overlapping partitions"

I'm not quite sure what happened to the other partitions so I ran BartPE and ran "Diskinternals Partition Recovery 2.7" and ran it from the CD.

Launched the trial version and these were the results:

Hard Disk Drives

C: (Charts) 38.09 Gb NTFS

D: 76.17 GB NTFS

F: 9.00 Mb NTFS

Unallocated space (NT_Mapped_File B at end) 31.92 Gb

Unallocated space (ST9160310AS in the middle) 34.78 Gb

Physical Drives

NT_Mapped_File B 31.92 Mb

ST9160310AS 149.05 Gb

Going back to the "Partition Recovery 2.7 terminal I double clicked on the C: (Charts) and ran a program that showed approx. 20 Gb of my deleted data. If I could copy that over to a usb drive I would remove the partitions and reinstall Windows.

The problem I'm having is Diskinternals will only allow me to copy over 1 Gb and requires a license costing $139 to recover the balance.

I was under the impression if was free for home use.

I am looking forward to any help you can offer,

Many thanks.....

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Thanks for the read Jaclaz.

To answer Ponch:

I had used GParted to move the Extended Partition to expose the second unallocated partition then increased the size of the first unallocated partition to 79Gig.

I tried installing Win XP SP2 and after formatting NTFS and installing the set up files it failed to reboot and went back to the beginning of the install.

I ran GParted and now I have one unallocated partition 149Gig with warning stating that "Can't have overlapping partitions"

I'm not quite sure what happened to the other partitions so I ran BartPE and ran "Diskinternals Partition Recovery 2.7" and ran it from the CD.

Launched the trial version and these were the results:

Hard Disk Drives

C: (Charts) 38.09 Gb NTFS

D: 76.17 GB NTFS

F: 9.00 Mb NTFS

Unallocated space (NT_Mapped_File B at end) 31.92 Gb

Unallocated space (ST9160310AS in the middle) 34.78 Gb

Physical Drives

NT_Mapped_File B 31.92 Mb

ST9160310AS 149.05 Gb

Going back to the "Partition Recovery 2.7 terminal I double clicked on the C: (Charts) and ran a program that showed approx. 20 Gb of my deleted data. If I could copy that over to a usb drive I would remove the partitions and reinstall Windows.

The problem I'm having is Diskinternals will only allow me to copy over 1 Gb and requires a license costing $139 to recover the balance.

I was under the impression if was free for home use.

I am looking forward to any help you can offer,

Many thanks.....

Edited by Estam
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You fell in the usual "trap" :w00t: that programs like Gparted (or Partition Magic, or similar) provide.

Since you have before you a nice, graphical representation of the disk you expect that you will be able to do *whatever* you think fit, completely ignoring what is "behind it".

This usually resolves in "havoc". :ph34r:

Partitioning/re-partitioning/re-sizing parittions, etc. is a COMPLEX thing to do and these tools only SEEMINGLY make it easy. :(

Using more "random" programs, which you (and we) are not perfectly familiar with is a good way to make things worse.

What you should do right now is to run TESTDISK on that dirve (with a log), DO NOT WRITE anything to the disk, i.e. DO NOT attempt to repiar that disk, and post the TESTDISK log.

This way maybe we can get an idea of the actual situation of your disk and of your current partitioning (right now it is not clear at all what is the current status).

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

jaclaz

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