Help me repartition my sagetv system drive

[Dargason]

It's a long and uninteresting story as to how I got where I am, so I'll spare you. (It was a dual-boot WinXP/Win8 system.)

The system drive on my Sage server is a 80gb SSD that has been partitioned into 2 40 gb disks. I'm finding that 40gb just isn't quite enough space (Windows updates keep eating it.) So I want to remove the second 40gb partition (which is empty) and allow the system to use it.

The odd thing is that the 40gb I want to keep is at the 'top' of the disk, while the 40gb I want to get rid of is in the 'bottom', along with the boot loader stuff, so I can't just grow the partition normally.

I'm thinking what I need to do is to make an image of the Win7 boot disk, re-partition the 80gb, then install the image to the now-80gb system disk.

But I'm not very familiar with this sort of operation, and I know it can be perilous. Can you re-install a disk image to a larger partition? Will it care that it's not in the same physical (or logical) location on the disk?

Mike

[Skirge01]

If you have a backup image of the entire drive to start with, then you have nothing to lose by trying. Use any free partition utility such as Gparted or EaseUS Partition Master. If the MBR gets messed up, Windows 7 is pretty good at fixing itself. Worst case, you have to restore from your backup image.

[pjwerdna]

If this is windows 7, why not just extend the C drive from within windows?

Open computer management.
Goto Disk Management
Right click the the first partition and select "Shrink volume..."
...
Right click the C drive and select "Extend Volume..."

Provided you dont mind having a small partition for bootloading etc this would work and save havign to mess with images and repairing.

Not actually tried extending recently so I cant remember the remaining steps, but the shrink option is definitely easy and works well as I used it on a laptop to dual boot it to windows 8.

[Dargason]

Didn't mean to ignore you guys... Labor day was a busy time and it wasn't until today that I've had time to play with this again.

If this is windows 7, why not just extend the C drive from within windows?

Because the Win7 partition is 'to the right' of the Win8 partition. Windows 7 tool cannot extend a partition 'backwards.'

Here's what I ended up doing.

1. Make a backup image of the Win7 partition. (I do this weekly anyway using Paragon Backup and Restore Free)
2. Restore the backup image to the Win8 partition.
3. This hosed my boot manager and the computer wouldn't boot at all... but as Skirge01 said, the Windows 7 installation disk was able to locate the two bootable partitions and generate a new boot manager.

So now I have the same data on two partitions. I figure I'll run using the new partition for a while just to be sure everything's working correctly. Then I can delete the second partition and 'extend' the new partition to be entire drive.