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Mon 27 Jan, 2014 10:55 am
I have a used Sony Vaio laptop, when I got it there was Windows 7 installed. Without realising the consequences of what I was doing, and to see what happened, I converted hard boot drive from basic to dynamic, and partitioning it into two drives.
Ok, so realising Windows 7 slowed the laptop down to an almost unusable state (and without any windows 7 backup disk) I installed Windows XP Pro SP3 onto the hard drive instead and deleted the partition I'd created. This did not get rid of the partition but simply wiped it and the partition still remains in a blank state.
With windows xp pro installed as hoped the laptop ran much better, however, the hard drive remained partitioned and now I want to remove the partition that I created when windows 7 was installed so that the hard drive can be one whole drive, not two partitions. The problem is even with all the great partition software available out there (and I've tried most now) the partition refuses to merge back into one as it was before. The reason is as far as I've discovered is that the boot drive was converted from basic to dynamic whilst windows 7 was installed and now that only windows xp pro is installed the drive will not convert back using xp, when trying I'm asked to return to windows 7 and then revert from dynamic to basic that way, but as stated I do not have any windows 7 software to do this, so need to keep with windows xp pro to do the reversion.
Does anyone know how to do this, or can point in the right direction?
Thanks
@Woof,
Basic to dynamic easy peasy.
Dynamic to basic... wipe and reload is only way. You'll have to kill the MBR which will kill the data on your drive. But can easily be done so long as you have backups of your data.
@McGentrix,
Thanks, was hoping something like that wasn't needed, but before doing that couldn't I backup the data by cloning the whole drive with cloning software, the sort that clones everything to transfer onto another computer, and when the drive is clear then apply the cloned drive data back onto wiped drive?
@Woof,
With XP that should be doable. Just bear in mind that you are setting basic and dynamic with in the OS so after cloning you may still be stuck with a dynamic disk. You'd be better off saving data to other HD and them loading OS on initialized drive and copying data back.
@McGentrix,
Thanks again, very helpful advice
One side thought, what is dynamic, is there a benefit? That is to say, what is the difference between basic and dynamic?
@McGentrix,
Thanks, taken a good look at the link and it's been really useful, you've been a great help
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