Partition Help Needed

[gimpdoctor]

Hi All,

 

Firstly, sorry if this isn't the right place to post, and also thank you to anyone who can help me out.

 

I recently upgraded my laptop by adding an SSD, and wanted to wipe everything and start from scratch with windows10 now on the SSD. I managed to get the OS onto the SSD, but I was going about wiping the hard drive when I noticed that there is a partition on it named "recovery" which is the active partition. My understanding is that this is active because it contains files necessary to communicate to the hardware where to find the OS (i.e. how to boot properly). I'm guessing then that normally this partition would be on the same drive as the OS, but for some reason (perhaps to do with the fact that my hard drive and SSD were both plugged in during windows installation) this partition was left on the hard drive.

 

Should this partition be on my SSD? If so is there a way to move it? Normally I believe these partitions are only supposed to be a few MB, but mine is 15GB, also it seems to be stopping me from merging the other volumes "storage" and "new volume" on the hard drive. I'm more concerned also because if the hard drive fails or i want to replace it, I won't be able to boot to windows on the SSD...

 

Any help on this is really appreciated! I've attached below an image of the Disk Management screen.

[kb5zue]

Get yourself a copy of the Windows Media Creation tool for starters.  After you have that, remove/disconnect the old drive while making sure the new SSD is connected.  You only want the bootable drive to be connected during the process of installing the OS onto the new drive.

 

Once you complete the OS installation on the new drive you can connect the old drive and delete/remove ALL the partitions on the old drive.  When I did this same exact procedure on my laptop, I put the old drive in my desktop and took care of it there.  There is not/was not, enough space inside the laptop for both drives in my case so when I went with the SSD, the old drive had to go.

[keskparane]

I'm a bit rusty with this stuff so might pay to get some confirmation but I think basically...

• Active partition is just the partition that that disk will look to during boot if that disk is the primary drive. It is active because of flag set in the master boot record of that disk.
• However your system is booting to disk 1, so it doesn't matter.
• You should be able to safely remove the recovery & new volume partitions and extend the storage partition.

[gimpdoctor]

8 hours ago, keskparane said:

I'm a bit rusty with this stuff so might pay to get some confirmation but I think basically...

• Active partition is just the partition that that disk will look to during boot if that disk is the primary drive. It is active because of flag set in the master boot record of that disk.
• However your system is booting to disk 1, so it doesn't matter.
• You should be able to safely remove the recovery & new volume partitions and extend the storage partition.

Shouldn't there be an active partition on Disk 1 then? I thought that for windows the partition labelled "boot" and the one labelled "active" should be different partitions?

Also windows won't allow me to remove the recovery partition, some google results say it needs to be overridden in command prompt some how - obviously I'm just trying to be as cautious as I can, since I don't own a USB stick right now so if I can't boot then things would get a lot more complicated...

[keskparane]

1 hour ago, gimpdoctor said:

Shouldn't there be an active partition on Disk 1 then? I thought that for windows the partition labelled "boot" and the one labelled "active" should be different partitions?

Also windows won't allow me to remove the recovery partition, some google results say it needs to be overridden in command prompt some how - obviously I'm just trying to be as cautious as I can, since I don't own a USB stick right now so if I can't boot then things would get a lot more complicated...

Disk 1 will be using guid partition table instead of mbr. So no active partition required.

 

Here's how you can safely test.

• Turn computer off and disconnect disk 0.
• Restart PC.

If you boot into windows you have confirmed disk 1 boot independently.

Once you have confirmed your ssd is booting independently you can reattach the old drive and use diskpart to clear the other partitions.

[gimpdoctor]

8 hours ago, keskparane said:

Disk 1 will be using guid partition table instead of mbr. So no active partition required.

 

Here's how you can safely test.

• Turn computer off and disconnect disk 0.
• Restart PC.

If you boot into windows you have confirmed disk 1 boot independently.

Once you have confirmed your ssd is booting independently you can reattach the old drive and use diskpart to clear the other partitions.

Hey, that's a really good idea! I just tried it though and it won't boot - so Disk 1 isn't booting independantly. Do you think the only thing I can do is reinstall windows via USB stick, and remove the hard drive for the duration of the installation? Anything else I can do?

[keskparane]

Have you checked bios for boot options? Look for UEFI boot.

If your unsure just list your computer make model.

[keskparane]

Ok. I forgot some stuff.  

Yeah you would need some system partitions on the disk. So yeah the easiest way would probably be to reinstall windows with the old drive removed.

[gimpdoctor]

ok so when the hard drive is removed the message I get when booting is:
"No bootable device -- insert boot disk and press any key"

 

I cannot access the UEFI when the hard drive is not connected apparently... the same message is displayed when the USB stick (with the windows installation tool on it) is connected. So I need the hard drive to be able to tell the BIOS to boot off the USB.. this is getting really catch 22-ish...

 

Gonna try using the hard drive to boot from USB stick, then remove the hard drive just before installing... here's to hoping I don't break everything

[gimpdoctor]

Update: It didn't break - though I had some trouble removing the system partition from the hard drive. For any future googlers having a problem this is what happened:

I couldn't delete the partition in disk management, I couldn't use Diskpart to delete it without getting the message: "Virtual Disk Service error: Delete is not allowed on the current boot, system, pagefile, crashdump or hibernation volume" (even when using the override parameter)

I tried using EaseUS to delete the partition but it gave me no option to - and couldn't convert to logical either. The solution that worked was using EaseUS's "wipe data" option on the partition. This is a surprising result because I expected it to either not allow me to wipe it or else it would just wipe everything except the files required for booting. 

 

Anyway thank you guys for all your help - I do really appreciate it.