Resize primary partition in Vista

Hello,

I have a Vaio with Vista that I just spent about 10 hours or so cleaning up
crapware, etc. from. Now, Sony has a hidden 8GB recovery partition that I
very much would like to reclaim. So I deleted the recovery partition using
diskpart. Next I went on to try to expand/extend the primary partition, but
that option is not available from the GUI and diskpart does not allow it
either.

I believe this is because the now deleted recovery partition was the first
partition and the primary partition is on offset 8GB. In other words, the
now unallocated space is not located after the primary partition.

Next I tried to make a "Complete System Backup" to a USB drive and then
delete the primary partition and create a new partition covering the full
disk. But when I use the recovery DVD to restore the complete system
backup, it also restores partition information, etc. so I am back to still
not having a the first 8GB as part of the primary partition.

Is there any tool out there that safely can expand a partition in Vista
under these circumstances? Or a tool that makes a full system backup
without requiring the same partition layout when restoring?

Thanks,
Larry

 

Greetings Larry,
You can try one of the many partition tools. Partition magic will allow you
to resize the NTFS partitions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PartitionMagic

The link also provides information regarding other, free tools, but they're
not as easy to use.

 

Suggest you try the 'gparted' Live CD - it should be able to do that for
you.

 

Suggest you try the 'gparted' Live CD - it should be able to do that for

Thanks Mark & Ray, I'll check them out.

Larry

 

Suggest you try the 'gparted' Live CD - it should be able to do that for

Ray,

Tried that. Did not work - gparted claimed disk needed "chkdsk -f" and then
reboot twice, etc. This seems to be a known issue with gparted and Vista
Business.

I'd hate to spend $50-70 bucks for a one-time partitioning job, but maybe
that's the only way (or I could just use the small 8GB partition for data, I
guess).

Larry

 

For that kind of money you can buy another hard drive.

 

That's odd. Sony's installation media used to give end users the option of
restoring the original layout or altering it -- so that a clean installation
of the OS was possible. If I were you I would contact Sony support and ask
them for an installation disc which would allow a clean installation without
the utilities partition (or whatever the heck they call it). They should make
such a disc available for cost of media / shipping.

The first thing I do with any consumer grade system is wipe the crud that
the vendor put on there and start with a clean slate. If you haven't
experienced a clean installation of Vista without all of the junk the vendors
throw on there, you'd be amazed at how much better the operating system is
without it.

 

Actually, I spoke to their support several times (including their 2nd level)
and when I asked for how to eliminate the recovery partition, the tech told
me I had to buy a retail Windows version - their recovery CDs will
automatically re-create the partions and put all the junk back on. If they
at least would have had the brains / thoughfulness to put the recovery
partition after the primary, so that you could delete the recovery and grow
the primary... I looked into throwing out Vista and installing XP instead,
but many of the drivers for XP warns about "some features may not be
available / work correctly"...

I even tried Acronis True Image, hoping that I could restore a disk image to
a larger partition, but it appears it either restores select files or the
full disk (including partition table). I am amazed at how difficult it
turned out to be to reclaim the space taken by recovery partition.

Larry

 

I'm sorry to hear that. I think that's a really bad move on Sony's part. I
have a couple of their video workstations that came with XP. The recovery
discs allowed you to do either a "cruddy" installation or a clean
installation.

That said, I'm going to suggest that you call them back and demand / wheedle
a little to be sure they don't have an alternative media supply. If not, then
you might want to purchase an OEM version of Vista from a legitimate online
source. That's a lot cheaper than the full or upgrade retail version. It
would probably cost about the same as purchasing a commercial partitioning
utility.

To be frank, I think using a third party partitioning tool for something
like this is a little nuts. I would always prefer to trust the partitioning
tools that come with the OS. There are too many "features" on software like
Partition Magic that can lead to trouble, if imprudently used. And how are
you to know what's imprudent until you've tried it and botched it?



I hope you can find a sympathetic ear at Sony. They should at least be made
aware that a paying customer is not satisfied with their current way of
handling this. I was under the impression that MS required OEMs to make a
relatively "clean" copy of the OS available to customers. In all cases of
which I am aware, customers of various vendors have been able to get such
copies upon request.

 

True Image will restore a partition image to a larger or smaller
target space (provided it will fit obviously).