Dear all,

Today I did a clean reinstall of Windows 7 on my brother's pc, and in the process attempted to change his harddisk partitions. He had the following three: (actually he had four, but the fourth is a small partition called 'Recovery', which I left alone since I have no clue what it does)

C:\ A roughly 88gb large partition on which he still had an old Vista installation.
D:\ A roughly 550gb large partition on which he had his Windows 7 installed.
E:\ Also roughly 550gb large, he kept his games on there.

What my brother asked of me:
- Format all disks, so he got rid of Vista and his old Windows 7 install
- Reinstall Windows 7 on D:\
- Merge the C:\ partition with E:\, so he would have more room to install games.

Formatting and reinstalling wasn't a problem. I also got rid of the C:\ partition, so those 88gb are now unallocated space. Also, at this point D:\ and E:\ where renamed into C:\ and D:\ respecitvely. However, when trying to extend the former partition E:\, now known as D:\, with the unallocated space, I ran into a problem.

I have been using http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/2670-partition-volume-extend.html At first I wanted to use method one, since that looked a lot simpler, but since the unallocated space was to the left of the partition I wanted to extend to I had to use method two, using the command prompt. I made it to step 7, where I have to give the 'extend' command, but there I got the following error:

uds-fout: de uitbreiding is kleiner dan de minimale grootte
Which translates roughly to:
uds-error: the extension is smaller than the minimum size

So now, while my brother can use his computer, he is stuck with 88gb of unallocated space that he cannot use. I suppose I can try to create a new partition with it again, but I really would want to use the space to extend the other one. If anyone can help me solve this issue I would be most grateful.

And please forgive any poor spelling, I don't have an English dictionary installed on this computer.

I would download http://gparted.sourceforge.net/, ("GParted is a free partition editor for graphically managing your disk partitions.") burn it to disk and then boot from that disk. Move the new C: partition to the front of the platter so the 88GB partition is beside the one you want to merge it with then resize the 550GB Gparted using the 88GB of unallocated space.

Good luck.

P.S.

You want http://sourceforge.net/projects/gparted/files/gparted-live-stable/.

Thanks, I will try that as soon as my brother's pc is done reinstalling the drivers!

Why not install Windows 7 on the 88GB partition instead and merge the two 550GB ones? Windows doesn't need that much space, and it'd be quicker to reinstall in the future if you had your other stuff on a different partition than Windows.

You can do all that partition management right in the Windows installer, by click the "advanced" button.

My way is faster seeing you do not need to bother with the OS reinstall/updating/driver installing/etc.

Tis true W7 does not need that much space, thankfully they can just shrink it while they do the rest with Gparted.

Either way works, though again, mine is simply faster is all.

Thanks for the advice, but I'm going to do it the way we planned. He uses his C:\ drive to store lots of other stuff as well, like college projects and things I am not sure I wish to know the nature of .


I think it's going to work, but I got slowed down by slow driver installs, a few error reports while using Gparted and the fact that I had to go see Captain America before I was completely done. I'll finish up tomorrow and let you know how it went .

if your still at that stage (where all the data was already destroyed i'm assuming) then i would suggest booting back into the windows installer, deleting all the partitions, then making the partitions again without the confusing steps of switching merging and whatnot

Alternately if you want to wipe all of the data when you install Windows 7 I think it allows you to make multiple partitions at the size you want which you could utilize. This will need a clean install of 7 but should provide you the most hassle free (relatively speaking) method of doing what you need to if Gparted doesnt't work out.

Yes I am still at that stage. I didn't know you could do all that from the windows installer, that'll be my backup plan if I mess up with Gparted. Thanks!

When it asks about the partitions just hit New and choose a size then keep doing that for your unallocated space. If you just click next it makes it all one large partition. You may have to delete existing partitions however for this to work as expected.

Well, it's done!

Using GParted didn't work out, couldn't continue because of an error I was getting. Something about a missing/unreadable ntfs-signature on one of the partitions. Didn't know what to do about that, and at first glance at least neither did google, so I decided to go for the backup plan as proposed by Ditre and DarkOne, reinstalling windows and managing the partitions in the installer.

My brother now has a 250gb C:\ partition with windows on it (more than necessary, but better safe than sorry we thought) and a 930gb D:\ partition for everything else, which should be more than plenty for him. For some reason the D:\ partition was formatted as Raw instead of ntfs after the windows reinstall and could be seen, but not accessed in My Computer. I don't know what that means, but I do know that a simple format fixed it, so now everything is as it is supposed to be.

I want to thank you all very much for your help. I know it sounds a bit cliché, but I'm pretty sure I couldn't have done this without it . Because of my technical ineptitude it took quite a bit longer than it had to, but I learned a lot of new things so I'm perfectly fine with that. Given how this thread has served its purpose I'll see if there's a mod online to close it. You have my gratitude, and that of my brother too .

The problem has been sorted and the OP requested a topic close.