Windows 7 won't recognize my new partition, calls it free space

[ackbark]

I've just installed Win7.

But first I created a new partition with Partition Wizard and cloned the Vista partition into it giving it a new drive letter and calling it 'Vista'.

Everything went great except Win7 won't recognize the new partition calling it 'free space'.

Partition Wizard won't see it either, but does see that it's called 'Vista', but doesn't see a drive letter.

An answer to a similar problem said I could simply look at it with Disk Management and assign it a drive letter, but it won't give that option calling it free space, but does give an option to delete that partition.

How do I get this thing to appear properly as a partition?

I've been able to recover all the stuff out that was in there using the version of GetDataBack that's on Hiren's Boot Disk, but I would still like to properly have this thing set up as a partition.

If I can't do that how do I correctly eliminate it and return the space to the C partition?

 

[patcooke]

Get a free copy of Easeus Partition Manager from here:

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Give you much more powerful control of your partitions.

 

[ackbark]

Thanks, but that seems to be limited to 32-bit, my system is 64-bit.

 

[Mike]

What is the size of the partition?

 

[ackbark]

Partition is 215 GB.

 

[Mike]

That's nowhere near the threshold I was hoping. Have you considered the clone process failed, and would you be willing to do it over again? This would involve reformatting the bad partition and re-cloning. Use a verification option if possible?

Use the Partition Bootable CD (always do things like this bare metal). I don't know if this program lets you do it from within Windows, but it really should not if it does. These types of techniques can be highly faulty, especially when we are talking about moving live system files. Unfortunately, manipulating shadow copy has become the cool thing amongst live cloning software. I don't know if Partition Wizard does this, though.

So here are my suggestions:

• Make sure you use the Bootable CD option.
• Reformat the failed cloned partition and clean it out. Format it as RAW if you can.
• Get rid of the entire partition, and after doing this, cold boot the system. (Shutdown the system after the partition is deleted).
• Recreate the partition, and once that is done, once again cold boot the system. (Shutdown the system after the partition is created).
• Start the clone process again, and use a verification option if you can.

If all else fails, try CloneZilla. I do not hesitate to use Paragon Backup & Recovery Suite 10, as the bootable CD is completely masterful. It uses the Windows Vista PE environment, as opposed to Acronis, and this is a personal preference of mine. I have documented in a YouTube video of how to do a bare metal backup and restore with this software, and it also allows for cloning.

In all instances of these operations, I never perform any type of operation like this with Windows actually running, and suggest that you do the same. The chance for error becomes more and more prominent as you do more and more backups or clones. I believe the exception to this is with the Windows Server 2008 Backup server role, but that's going off-topic.

 

[ackbark]

The partition that was cloned is already wiped out when I installed Win7 into it.

Wiping out the new partition and getting it established as a functional partition is fine with me.

 

[Mike]

If I can't do that how do I correctly eliminate it and return the space to the C partition?

If this continues to fail, simply enter diskmgmt.msc and remove the bad partition. Right-click on the existing partition and expand it to encompass the new one.