Windows 7 I Deleted All My Partitions (All Files Including OS) In Windows 7 Disk Utility.

[Clickeee]

I Upgraded My Windows7 Starter To Ultimate Recently And Everything Was Going Fine, But I Wasn't Happy With The Disk Space Because I Had Ubuntu As Second OS And I Wanted More Space For Win7. ( Ubuntu Was In The same Partition As Win7 C: ). I Searched For Ways Of Increasing The Size Of The Partition But I Didn't Understood Them So I Deleted Ubuntu. The Space Wasn't Recovered (Unallocated Space) So I Still Searched For Ways Of Making The Partition Size Bigger And i Found a Way That Said If You Right Clicked The Gray Square Of Disk Utility And Click a Phrase That i Don't Remember You Can Show the "Resize" Option Of the Partition.i Did That and i Received a Notification Dialog That Said That Said That If i Do That All The Partitions (OS's, Files, And Drivers) Would Be Deleted And I Like A DUMB Clicked "Ok" At Next Restart There Was No Boot Manager, The Boot Just Loaded Again And Again. So I Installed Ubuntu Using a Bootable USB (Current OS) And There Was No "Install Alongside Other OS" Option. I Tried To Run Windows 7 Setup Again Using a Bootable USB, But I Get Stuck at The Part That You Must Select The Drivers Needed So Windows Could Read The Partitions. I Have The CD With The Drivers But i Have a Dell Inspiron Mini 1012 Netbook With No CD Drive So i Downloaded All The Drivers That the Factory Installs From Dell.com And Saved It on A USB But the Windows 7 Setup Doesn't Recognize The Drivers, It Only Recognize The USB But Not It Contents(Drivers).
Please Help Me, I Want To Keep Using Windows 7 And All Programs i Need Windows But It Seems Like Ubuntu Is My Only Option.

 

[fjgold]

Thank you for your interest Frank. But in this case even a back up won't help as once you alter the disks,that's it. So i think in my case and other people's as well-DO NOT TOUCH THE HARD DISKS.

We have already seen what happens if you do,from what happened to the person,who did that,here on this forum. Andrea Borman.

You are wrong Andrea.
An image backup can be easily restored to a blank hard drive.
That is how I moved my Win 7 install to a larger drive, a brand new blank drive.
It took some planning and forethought but in the end it was a snap and took a fraction of the time to
do a reinstall.
Just because something is beyond your limited abilities doesn't mean none of the rest of can't
or shouldn't attempt it.
Actually, lets see, according to you here and in other threads I should not use linux or partition my drive and I should uninstall IE and other core Windows components and remove my anti virus software.
No offense, thanks, but I think I'll ignore all you recommendations and advice.

 

[Super Sarge]

I have also done the same thing using Acronis I cloned from a smaller HD to Bigger Had, I just used macrium Reflect to restore a Vista 32 Image to one of my Internal Hard drives(HD) so I now have a dual boot configuration

 

[fjgold]

I have also done the same thing using Acronis I cloned from a smaller HD to Bigger Had, I just used macrium Reflect to restore a Vista 32 Image to one of my Internal Hard drives(HD) so I now have a dual boot configuration

Cool. In my case I had Win 7 on my first partition and 5 linux installs on 5 more ext3 partitions.
My drive is partitioned with a 22 GB partition at the front for Windows with 5 19 GB ext3 linux partitions plus a 4 GB swap partition and a large 170 GB Fat 32 partition to share between all OS's and an equally large NTFS partition to store data and install Windows programs.
I moved up from a 320 G drive to a 500 GB drive.
In preparation I use Gparted Live to create an identical partition structure as my old drive with the Fat 32 and NTFS partitions proportionally larger.
I then used an external drive dock to copy all my files from my data partitions to their new larger partitions and restored the images I had made of my 6 OS's before starting the job. I use Clonezilla Live.
Total time an hour or two.

I did have to run the Super Grub CD and restore the grub bootloader to the MBR afterwords, but when I started y machine there was my usual boot screen with my various OS entries just like on the old drive.
Everything booted perfectly and I now have more storage space.

It would have taken days to install everything from scratch.

 

[stueycaster]

That's way cool Frank. I'm impressed.

 

[fjgold]

I've used this same technique before to move my 200 GB drive to the 320 GB.
I will do it again when I get a 750 GB drive in the near future.
It's moderately easy to do, it just requires planning and attention to detail.

 

[Super Sarge]

Me I am just a Windows User I have my Vista 32 on a 750 Gig HD, My W7 64 bit on a 1.5 TB and I save My vista to another Internal drive I have 4 Internal Sata Drives 2 are 1.5 TB the other 2 are 750 Gig Sata Drives. I also Have a few external drives a 150 gig a 500 gig, two 1.tb drives and 250 gig portable drive. My 4 internal drives are all Seagate. I keep all my downloads on one internal drive and one external drive. I do a daily full scheduled backup using W7 to one internal drive, I do weekly full manual backup to a different internal drive using Macrium. I have used both to restore drives and never had a problem. I have booted to a kubantu but never installed it on any disc just played with it on CD

 

[Joe S]

Well,the truth is I do not know how to partition my hard disks, and I am sure I would damage my computer if I even tried to do this. So in my case, and for most other people, it is better if we do not have access to this feature.

It is the only way to be safe. Andrea Borman.

There is a lot you don't know and understand about computers maybe you should learn about it before giving such expert advice. On partitioning it's nice to be able to a clean install and not have to reload all of your data or just one OS on a multiboot setup.
Joe

 

[fjgold]

Me I am just a Windows User I have my Vista 32 on a 750 Gig HD, My W7 64 bit on a 1.5 TB and I save My vista to another Internal drive I have 4 Internal Sata Drives 2 are 1.5 TB the other 2 are 750 Gig Sata Drives. I also Have a few external drives a 150 gig a 500 gig, two 1.tb drives and 250 gig portable drive. My 4 internal drives are all Seagate. I keep all my downloads on one internal drive and one external drive. I do a daily full scheduled backup using W7 to one internal drive, I do weekly full manual backup to a different internal drive using Macrium. I have used both to restore drives and never had a problem. I have booted to a kubantu but never installed it on any disc just played with it on CD

Impressive setup Sarge.

 

[stueycaster]

In the past I've dual booted quite a lot. I've run XP Home + XP Pro x64, XP Pro x64 + Ubuntu (every version from 7.04 to 10.10) or Vista + XP Home. On my desktop I used to run a Raid1 set up since I wasn't good about backing up. I figured if I had a hard drive crash I had 2 copies. Also I stored everything important on separate partitions. If I needed to reinstall Windows I did a clean installation then copied everything I needed from my other partitions. Vista + Xp was on a laptop.

It never bothered me to start from scratch with a clean installation of Windows. I tried a lot of different software on XP that really didn't work right and it always seemed to accumulate garbage and started running badly over time. A clean installation seemed to be the way to go.

But nowadays I have settled on some software that runs very well on Windows 7 so my computer always runs good. I've started running Acronis backups to keep things the way they are. I haven't needed to restore from a back up yet. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Here's my question. In the past something would happen to the boot loaders in my operating systems and I would lose the ability to boot one or both. I've decided to never dual boot again because I'm just sick of it. Are you guys able to multi boot your systems and never run into boot loader problems? If so what do you do that keeps them running right? I never had any luck with it.

 

[Super Sarge]

I use a program called Vista Boot Pro 3
Link Removed
This allows me to set the the default for which system I want to boot into. It comes in handy on Patch Tuesday, I run my updates I set W7 as the default so if a re-boot is needed It will automatically boot to the W7 disc. I then set Vista 32 as default boot into OS run update if it needs to re-boot because of updates it boots into Vista. I then reset it to W7 my primary OS. Every Friday I run and boot into Vista to bring everything up to-date. I then go back to W7

 

[fjgold]

Hi Stuey, since I multiboot with linux I use the GRUB bootloader.
It boots my Win 7 install as well as my various linux distros.
It overwrites the MBR and works fine.
Sometimes Windows will reclaim the MBR and this prevents me from booting my linux installs.
The fix is easy, I just pop in my Super GRUB live CD and restore GRUB to the MBR.
Actually the only times I need to do this is after a clean install or a repair procedure of Windows.
I normally don't waste time with repair procedures since I have a Clonezilla image I can restore instead.
An image restore doesn't mess with the MBR.