[Closed] Disk partitioning Q

Extend the partition?

I've only messed with mac partitions in the last few years but this makes it sound fairly simple -

https://www.disk-partition.com/windows-10/windows-10-disk-management-0528.html

Yep. Just shrink one partition then extend the c partition into that space. There's a tool built I to windows 10 for this although it isn't perfect. There are plenty of third party programs out there too

Actually I've misremembered all of this (it's been a while and I've pretended that it was fine, and now it's becoming less manageable) and what actually happens is that this HP laptop has some sort of 30Gb SSD that was in addition to the HDD that was in the original shipped item to aid start up. When I replaced the borked HDD with the 250Gb SSD I tried to then "put" the C drive onto the bigger SSD to no avail.

So it's actually a different Q - and I don't expect a solution - it's whether I can somehow put the C drive partition onto another physical disk!

Too complicated I think, new laptop time more than likely. I've had this laptop for five years now (albeit with two new batteries and two new SSDs - trigger's laptop!)

Not sure I fully understand the issue, but if the drive is 250gb then you can easily extend the partition, you may need to delete any other partitions on the drive, unallocate the empty space then simply expand the primary partition to fill the whole drive.

If you want to clone your system onto a new drive, macrium reflect free edition is a great cloning tool. Which also has a bunch of other disk fettling features.

I'm guessing the hp system restore also just sets a 30gb primary partition, but this can just be expanded as above.

clonezilla is another free tool.  definitely don't buy another laptop just for something you can do very simply.  All you need is a way to have two powered drives connected to the laptop. a usb caddy would be the simplest way, then swap the disks over once 'cloned'. If it has a cd drive you can also put a hardrive in the bay.

Just there is a chance of wiping data. so back stuff up first in case you make a mistake.

As I understand it, the 30Gb C drive is a physically separate SSD (although there is no second HDD sized module inside the laptop so I've always assumed it was some sort of memory card or whatever) to the SSD I installed rather than a partition on the 250Gb one I installed later on.

It was sold as a hybrid HDD/SSD thing where the 30Gb drive was meant to boot it up quick (and it did) into the OS - then I swapped out the spinny/faily HDD that was onboard (separately) for the 250Gb SSD later and never had to reinstall Windows since the C drive was untouched.

If anyone can make sense of that, well done!

Ah OK so you've got 2 physical drives, the original 30 ish gb ssd, and a 250 gb ssd that replaced the mechanical HDD?

If that's the case, you need to put (clone) your c drive onto the big ssd, and make that your primary  boot drive, and then can effectively ignore the 30gb drive, or erase it to use as storage space or whatever.

That is correct on the set up.

My concern on cloning the C drive onto the big SSD is the sequencing of what happens in what order, since at some point after cloning the C contents onto the SSD I am going to have to rename the cloned big SSD as the C drive surely? I get the impression that it being *called* the C drive is important and that I can't just boot onto another letter and/or trick certain programs to install anywhere else other than a drive that is called "C"?

Somewhere in between the final switchover there is surely going to be a point where old C has to get renamed in order to be able to name SSD as new C. In which case won't everything just grind to a halt since there is no C drive in existence containing the OS??

In some ways this project is interesting and a challenge and in other ways it just says "new laptop" as previously opined 😉

New laptop?

It's a couple of hours work, most of which is just sitting waiting for the drive to clone itself. Then 10 minutes to change boot order and try it all out.

Or you could just  reinstall windows to a new partition on the 250GB SSD and once you've changed the boot order in the BIOS (and rebooted a few times to check it all works), reformat the 30GB SSD.

I've done the same three times in the last few years. Once to swap from an ancient (really cheap) HDD to a new SSD, then turned out the new SSD was slightly *too* budget and it began to throw up errors after 18 months, so swapped to a new SSD, which one of my kids promptly downloaded a pile of malware, trojans, viruses and suchlike to before i had a chance to set it up properly. So had to redo the whole process from the slightly budget SSD to the nice shiny new one. Been working perfectly since.

And the sequencing question though? To clarify I have done stuff like this in the past so I'm generally "handy" (albeit in a pragmatic and hasty Googly way) but can't get my head round how the "name" of the C drive will get transferred across. Or does whatever tool I use handle that too? Thanks genuinely for the help though everyone, as always a mine of information.

Do you actually have stuff on the C: drive you can't afford to lose? Although cloning should work (and yes cloning software should handle the volume renaming) it might be easier just to install Windows on the 250GB drive and make that the primary (and format the 30GB), that 30GB drive might have a funky sector size etc. that could screw up cloning.

Clean install on the big ssd is an option.

What you'll need to do after cloning is set the machine to boot up from the bigger drive, via the boot order menu in BIOS.

but can’t get my head round how the “name” of the C drive will get transferred across. Or does whatever tool I use handle that too?

Windows will take care of that, all you have to do is make sure Windows is installed on a bootable partition and set it to boot from that partition.

If you clone it, the GUID will be the same and the Windows install will assume it IS the C drive. Once its booitng off it you won't have to worry about that, though you should see the old drive in Disk Manager only if it hasn't been reassigned D: or something - you may need to manually assign a letter to get access to it.

Getting techy - I'd make that 30Gb drive the destination for swap and temp to claw a bit back from your new shiny SSD, but get it all booting first.

I give up. I've downloaded Clonezilla, gone through the instructions to get it onto a USB stick and bootable, told the BIOS to boot from USB and it just won't load up, goes into Windows without even trying. Tried using Tuxboot as suggested on the Clonezilla site, all to no avail.

Anyone know if there are any similar programs that will run via windows??

Try Macrium reflect free , but why are you putting it on a USB stick? You just need to clone the small drive onto the bigger one.

I'm talking about to run Clonezilla? Unless I'm completely missing the point it needs to boot off a USB?

http://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live.php#make

"To install Clonezilla live, the basic steps are to download pre-build Clonezilla Live then put it in a boot media (CD, USB flash drive or USB hard drive). Two types of files are available, iso and zip. The former one is for CD, the latter is for USB flash drive. Besides, you can put Clonezilla live on hard drive or PXE server, too."

I tried installing Macrium and comically it says it can't because there's.... "not enough space on the C drive" 😀

I've used EaseUS cloner direct from the live Windows partition - uses Shadow Copies so you shouldn't necessarily need to boot from an external media.

I don't know about clonezilla, but with macrium you just install the app to your c dive like any other app and run it from there.

They are only small apps so you must be able to free enough space to install it some how, delete history, unwanted files, possibly some system restore files of needed?

Go through the list of apps you have pre installed and nuke anything you don't really use.. If your Windows is from an HP image there's probably a boat load of unesesary apps preinstalled.

If you've installed a printer software suite, for example, get rid of it, you can always reinstall it later once everything is OK. They can be several hundred mb easily.

If it's proving too tricky then installing a clean fresh copy of Windows on your larger SSD may make more sense. All of your old data will still be on the 30gb drive so should be retrievable if needed.

Well, that's torn it. I used something called Partition Manager which seemed to work and I had a functioning copy of W10 on my SSD and the SSD was called "C". I then did the Windows Update (or rather it did it itself) which was quite a big one, it rebooted and all of a sudden it had renamed the original small SSD back as the "C" drive. I then thought I might do a full install of Windows 10 as a last resort and it then said that it could not detect the licence so one way or another I think I may have borked the thing unless I want to buy a copy of W10?  I get the impression that this laptop somehow has it hardwired that the 30Gb drive is the C drive!

The drive letter doesn't strictly mean anything, you can change it to Z if you want.

Have you checked in bios, on the boot order section, to force it to boot from the bigger SSD?

Yep I know I can call the drive anything, however since the Windows Update basically undid the partition name change (renaming the old C back as C!) without me asking and returned Windows to the old location somehow I am increasingly thinking that this laptop is locked down in how HP wanted it to be configured. I've had it five years and yes I've routinely removed the bloatware!

In BIOS there are very vague options, not like I've seen before. It says..

UEFI Boot Order
- USB CD/DVD ROM Drive
- USB Diskette on Key/USB Hard Disk
- OS boot Manager
- !Network Adapter

Legacy Boot Order
(all the same four options except it says "Notebook Hard Drive" in place of "OS boot Manager")

So there is no way to tell it to boot to a particular physical nor letter...

Basically - I've tried - it's not worked - it's new laptop time, thanks for all the help!!

In  bios, where it says OS boot manager, if you select that, does it allow you to drill down further to select your bigger ssd as opposed to the smaller one?

I'm just guessing, some bios' on prebuilt systems can be frustratingly limited and strange.

Nope, selecting those items does nothing, all you can do is change their order... Frustrating just about covers it 😉

The smaller partition is going to be your 'recovery' partition most likely.  It's stuffed full of tools, image and HP bloatware to restore your laptop to 'as shipped' if it goes Tango Uniform.

If you're updating the OS, then this partition is no further use and just a space hog - even assuming you didn't already regard it as one.

Based on my experience of Windows Partition managers, I wouldn't consider using one without a full backup of any thing I didn't want to lose.

TBH, once you've got a full backup, why not just 'Nuke it from orbit'?

A clean install *is* the only way to be sure...

You are probably going to need to go into BIOS and turn off 'secure boot' and possibly enable 'legacy boot' to be able to get rid of the recovery partition and use the whole drive.  'secure boot' may also be referred to as 'UEFI' - essentially it's 'Trusted Platform' stuff that's zero use outside of a Corporate context and from your point of view only locks your laptop down to HP's original drive image.

I have a HP laptop with a 30Gb SSD that I've just put win 10 on (I have just left the OS and program files on the SSD and moved the user files to the other HD though as the other HD is 'normal')

This is to run Clonezilla, so going back a few posts.

Go into the BIOS and right arrow onto the Advanced Menu, select boot options and change the boot mode to UEFI Hybrid. Save the changes - when you reboot it will now come up with Press Esc to enter Startup Menu.

In the Menu - F9 Boot Device Option - you can then select your USB Drive.

You can change the Boot order in BIOS to put USB's at at the top, I would expect that to work also.