[SOLVED] Recovery Partition

Ok so... new laptop with W7: Working on getting it all cleaned up from the crap Dell puts on there etc. and making it more "me". I have an external drive that I prefer to use for my backups so I got all that set, however I have an issue. I turned off the recovery features in W7 (because frankly I just don't need them) but I can't figure out how to delete the recovery partition and either a) merge it into the active W7 partition to increase it's size or b) format it as extra usable space (second 'drive'). I know in previous versions of Windows it was possible... and I know if I really wanted to I could completely redo it, partition the drive into one large one, and reinstall W7... but after everything I've put into getting this baby "me friendly" I just don't want to.

Help??

HM - Go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management and then Disk Management. Right-click on the recovery partition in the upper part of the window that you wish to delete and choose "Delete Volume" and it should be okay from there.

After that you should be able to merge it from there. There's a possibility that you may have to "Take Ownership" of it to do this. There's a registry tweak available to do it.

Add Take Ownership Option in Right Click Context Menu of Windows 7

Click on the above link and you can download a registry tweak to do it quickly and easily.

Ok so when I do that I get "Windows cannot delete the active system partition on this disk." I did however manage to get a drive letter assigned to it so I can at least access it as useable space now. I'd really prefer to just merge the two partitions though.

OH NO!!!!! Arghhhh....

So in my attempt to fix this, I thought "well this partition doesn't need to be active" so I set the other (C as active... it's the system partition. It was fine until I had to reboot... now it won't boot (BOOTMGR is missing)... *sob*. This is what I get for screwin around with it.

Sounds like a clean install for you. I hope that what I mentioned didn't screw things up for you.

You see, when I owned notebooks in the past, the first thing I did was erase the entire hard drive and reload the operating system and the software the way I wanted it to be.

You must have erased the 100MB hidden "system partition" which contained the bootmgr files.

If you need more help let us know.

Actually it looks like making the partition not active is the issue... it's all still there, just the wrong parition is active... the one with the bootmgr that is. Bleh! My fault... dummy me...

Ooops, never mind, you figured it.

I think there is two concurrent threads on this subject.

HappyMommy mark one or the other as "Solved", as it may be confusing to the other members.

Technically one was about how to delete the recovery partition (this one) and the other was what to do when you've accidentally marked your boot partition inactive. One caused the other. LOL