A partitioning conundrum

[Mark Phelps]

If you download and install EasyBCD from NeoSmart technologies, it had an option that will allow you to "migrate" the boot loader folder and files into your "OS" partition. Once installed, click the BCD Backup/Repair button, then click the Change boot drive radio button and select the OS partition.

After this, your boot files will be in the Win7 OS partition and you can then remove the original boot partition.

But, BEFORE you do this, do yourself a favor and use the Win7 Backup Feature to create and burn a Win7 Repair CD. That way, if anything goes wrong later, you can use that CD to rewrite your boot loader files.

However, that said, you are far from "home free" after you remove this one TINY partition. You will need to shrink the Win7 OS partition to make some room. Use only the Win7 Disk Management tool to do this; do NOT attempt to do this using the Ubuntu installer and its slider. Doing it that way risks corrupting the Win7 filesystem and rendering it unbootable.

[pwabrahams]

A couple of things I didn't make clear. I thought all along that with 4 primary partitions, there was no way I could create an extended partition unless I deleted one of them. But I was hoping I was wrong and had overlooked something, which was the whole point of the post. Unfortunately it seems that I was right.

When I assigned the drive letter E to sda1, I didn't actually create anything. I did that through Windows Disk Management. So after that I still had 4 partitions: sda1 (E, sda2 (C sda3 (D, and that fourth unreadable recovery partition. E: seems to be the boot partition.

I've taken the suggestion and, as we speak, I'm creating a set of recovery DVDs. It takes 4 of them, and a lot of time.

I think I've gotten around the problem, though. What I did was to copy the entire contents of D: into a folder in C: and then delete the D: partition. There was a weird recovery folder within D: that didn't seem to make it across, but I may never miss it. Once D: was gone, I used gparted to create an extended partition in its place, starting with an NTFS logical partition. In passing I also created root, home, and swap partitions for Kubuntu. When I rebooted back into Windows I was able to assign D: to that new logical partition and copy the contents of the old D: into it.

Now that I've gotten the flexibility of that extended partition, I can change things again if it proves necessary in the future.

By the way, one annoying oddity of the Lenovo Z580: it doesn't seem to have a disk activity light. None of the reviews I've seen mentioned that. Maybe it's lurking somewhere where I couldn't find it.