Installing on new volume

[Frank1]

You folks have helped me out a lot and now I have another question for you. I have installed Win8 on my desktop and everything is working as it should. I have two physical drives on my desktop one of which I use mainly for backups. On that drive I created a new volume and installed Win 8 on it. I’m happy with it. On my notebook I also installed it on a Virtual Box. But I like the way it is setup on my desktop better that the virtual box. Here’s what I’m wondering: On my laptop I have only one physical drive, but it has more space than I need. The drive has a total capacity of 576 GIG and I use only 60 GIG which leave me about 516 GIG of unused space. Can I do the same as I did on my desktop even though it has only one drive? That is can I shrink that drive to created a new volume on it so as to install Win 8? My desktop and my notebook both have Win 7 64 bit. Thanks for all the help you have given me. –Frank.

 

[GMan]

Yes you can. The easiest and painless way is to first run a space type of defrag to ensure the best you can that all files are near the beginning of the drive. Auslogics Disk Defrag is good for this. (Not necessary, but good. Makes it nicer/easier/quicker for shrinking utility.)

Then, use Acronis Disk Director to shrink the partition down to the new size you want. Also use it to create the new Primary NTFS partition in the new blank space. Then install Windows 8 to it.

Of course there are a million ways to go about it. I just gave you mine. Others may give you alternatives.

 

[Frank1]

Thank, Gman. I'm going to do it tomorrow. And, that Auslogics Disk Derrag is a good one. I use it often. Matter-of-fact, I think it's better than the built-in defrag that Windows has.

 

[Frank1]

Hi Gman, It just isn’t working for me. Maybe there is something that I don’t understand or I could possibly be doing something wrong. My computer is HP notebook with Windows 7 64 bit installed. It came with one physical drive which has the different volumes listed as:
Dr C: which, of course, is where Windows is installed.
Dr D: which is the Recover drive.
Dr E: which is listed as HP Tools
All drives are listed as “Simple Dynamic Volumes”.
So here’s what I did: I went to Disk Management and made a new volume which was listed as Dr G and formatted it to NTFS. Well I made a mistake and made it only 1 GB in size which was too small to install Windows 8. There is no way that I know of to get rid of Dr. G. So I then made another new volume named Dr H. I made it plenty big enough of 60 GB and then formatted it.
I tried to install Windows 8 on it but got a message that said, “Windows cannot be installed to this harddisk space. The partition contains one or more dynamic volumes that are not supported for installation. So do you or any other members know what the problem is? Maybe for some reason it can’t be done on my setup.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

You are in a bind.

You have dynamic volumes. Not good. You need to get rid of them. It's something of an involved procedure. You have to use a specialized tool like Partition Wizard.

Ultimately, you need to make an extended volume and then create a logical partition inside that extended volume. You can then install Windows 8 into that logical partition.

As far as I know, a logical partition can function perfectly well as a boot partition, but it can not be marked Active, it cannot be the System partition.

This dynamic disk thing probably occurred because you already had 3 or more partitions on the drive. You were probably asked if you wanted to convert to dynamic and said yes. You should have said no and instead created an extended partition.

Back up your data before fiddling with your partitions.

I don't think you can create an extended partition directly from Windows Disk Management. You need a specialized tool such as Partition Wizard or Paragon Partition Manager.

Edit:

Here is a tutorial on converting dynamic to basic.

http://www.partitionwizard.com/video-help/diskconvertdynamic/diskconvertdynamic.html

You need to use the bootable disk version (4.22) of Partition Wizard to do the job. You can get it here:

https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=b0a22789320e3247&id=B0A22789320E3247!215

 

[Frank1]

I think I'm going to forget about installing Windows 8. But, let me ask you this: I would of course back up all of the data that I need.
But if I do a System Recovery and bring it back to the factory settings, will it restore my hard disk the way it was? Or even with a Recovery, will the volumes that are there right not still be there after a system recovery?

 

[ignatzatsonic]

I don't know if you saw my edited post with the links to how you can convert to basic and the tool to do it?


I have never used HP recovery disks. My guess would be that they would take you back to a factory state in spite of now having dynamic disks.

But I stand to be corrected on that.