ok I need some help, I just recently got a laptop from dell, it obvoulsy has vista on it. my problem is, its a 60gb hard drive with a 10gb recovery partition making the drive 50 gigs. I have tried to merge it using the built in disk manager, but the "extend space" button is grayed out. so I've tried formatting it (I really dont need the recovery partiton because I have a 80gb usb drive) then using the extend space thing again and it is still grayed out. I restarted my laptop and it wont boot because it says the boot manager is missing, so I used the vista disk so fix that now, but im still stuck with that 10gb recovery partition. Any suggestions on how to merge that partition with the main one.
Yes, you can shrink your recovery partition to whatever you'd like and then you'll be left with unallocated space. You can then add that unallocated space to your 50 gig partition.
actually I have already tried that, It wont let me shrink the recovery partition past 5gb and even after I try that it still wont allow me to extend primary partition.
That's weird, so you're saying that your 50 gig partition won't extend the extra 5 gigs of unallocated space that you shrunk from your recovery partition.
Actually I've tried partition magic and its not compatiable with vista, I didnt try n.ghost. But in my ours of searching I found a linux program called Gparted. The full name for what I used is Gparted live cd. You mount the iso image to a blank cd, and boot the cd when the laptop starts. The program will start. Then from there you can delete the recovery patition and resize the partition with Vista on it. It will take a long time...very long. But it does work. The only problem is that something in Vista got corrupted and I had to repair it with the DVD. I dont know if it will get corrupted everytime but thats a chance you have to take. If anyone wants a link to the gparted download site its here. gparted live cd
I'm pretty sure vista will do that again if you delete the recovery partition, so i wouldn't do it again, but you could try if you want to. Also, in vista i've been able to shrink my recovery partition and extend it to my primary partition with no problems. This being done using using the same built in disk manager in vista that failed on you. When that program fails what does it say?
All right well what type of computer do you have because i have an hp and they let me delete me recovery partition, maybe your oem won't let you. For example since i purchased an hp, it came preloaded with hp recovery manager and they can let me delete that recovery partition.
