Tip & Trick: How to partition H.D.D in Preloaded Windows 7? [ Edited ]

[Anguel]

EverWin, many thanks for the fast reply!

After receiving the brand new laptop what I did first was saving the very first untouched factory image of the disk. I.e. I got the new laptop and started Acronis True Image 11 before even booting into Windows setup for the first time. This is the best one can do on a new PC because although I have received recovery media you can never revert to the first factory image once setup has started and you lose OEM stuff like MS Office Starter. Then I exchanged the HDD with a bigger one and restored the Acronis image to the new HDD. Now every time I restore the factory image I have a brand new factory laptop :-)

Back to the problem: I restore the factory image with Acronis without resizing anything and after first Windows auto-setup I have the following:

1. Partition: System 300 MB - primary, active

2. Partition: C: Windows 277 GB - primary

3. Partition: E: HP_RECOVERY 16 GB - primary

4. Partition: F: HP_TOOLS 5 GB - primary

5. Free unused space because of my new bigger HDD

Everything works fine, I boot with F11 into recovery and can run recovery as expected. I boot with F8 and chose repair computer and the recovery environment starts (it is actually also on the recovery partition).

Then I switch C: to logical without changing anything else. I use the simple menu command in Partition Wizard Home. Now I can still boot with F11 into Recovery but immediately get the recoveryPartitionIndex == bootPartition error. F8 works ok like before. Then I change back C: from logical to primary and everything boots fine also with F11 and the recovery error is not shown. This means that the error is reversible.

To me it seems that it somehow gets confused by that logical partition so the recovery program cannot execute anymore. I will now restore the factory image again and will boot into recovery to tell you which version the HP Recovery Manager reports.

UPDATE: The recovery program identifies itself as HP Recovery Manager 1.1.0.8

[nchh13]

Thank you EverWin for your tips, I will follow the guideline this evening on my personal HP EliteBook 8460p.

Just 1 quick question: If I change the partition letter of HP_RECOVERY and HP_Tools, will it work?! I prefer to have D: as my DATA partition then F: or G:

Thanks!

[EverWin]

no not at all, i do always remove assigned letters from disk management. b'cos its not required under windows 7

[nchh13]

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EverWin wrote:

no not at all, i do always remove assigned letters from disk management. b'cos its not required under windows 7

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My question is: "Will it work if I change the drive letters of HP built-in partition?"

You said "Not at all", but your explanation makes me think in the opposite way! ;-)

[nchh13]

Help me, please!

I followed the guideline, it worked for creating an extra DATA partition for personal data, but then I tried to load HP Recovery, it didn't work, error code is something like 0x0000000e. 

This is my current situation:

And now when I come with Partition Wizard Home, it appears like below!

[EverWin]

Hello,

    i am sry this happened to you, this is fixable its MBR problem during partition resize some partition must have overlap. There are many methods to fix it, i will come back to you with most safe way soon

[nchh13]

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EverWin wrote:

Hello,

    i am sry this happened to you, this is fixable its MBR problem during partition resize some partition must have overlap. There are many methods to fix it, i will come back to you with most safe way soon

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Thank you again for your help, EverWin, but I'm not sure it will be too late or not. After posting below post last night, I saw myself in the picture the function of Partition Wizard that seems nice: "Partition Recovery", I went on it and saw all the partitions, I checked all of them for recovery, it run a little bit and.... boooooom, dead blue screen. After that, I cannot boot into Windows anymore! 

I will try again when I come back home this evening, but even in the worse case, I still have the Windows 7 Pro 64bits for HP disc and the Drivers and Tools for 8460p to install. I will try if those 2 discs will return me back the full system that HP offers as the out of box status. Let's hope! If those 2 discs work fine, I think I can forget the HP_Recovery and HP_tools partitions.

[EverWin]

no its not too late, i have missed one thing

Why did you flagged HP Tool as "active" partition?

system reserved partition must be active Partition to boot into windows 7

you just need to set system partition active and that is all. if you can get system repair disk and boot it,

can you create it on different PC?

[nchh13]

The story is:

- I followed your guideline and successfully created D: partition for DATA.

- I tried again to see if Recovery working or not, and the result is was not.

- I remembered that I read somewhere that the HP Recovery should be primary and/or active. So I set it active -> cannot go to Recovery neither Windows 7.

- I used HirenBoot CD to set active for the System Reversed partition and it can boot Windows 7, but the recovery.

- I tried to set the drive letter for HP_RECOVERY and other stuff but nothing work, then the incident cause the whole disk wiped.

As a summary, I don't know since when my HP Recovery is not working anymore.

[samjambo]

my situation was that i had accidentally converted the HD to dynamic and windows 8 wouldn't install on any partition i had created..all i did was use 'PARTITION MAGIC' to convert back to basic..then made logical volumes out of the extra space in volume 'c'. There was no data loss..i can confidently confirm that. the only issue that remained was that i had deleted 'HP_TOOLS' partition and cannot get it to be recreated by the HP system diagnostic UEFI..i guess the number of primary partitions are at their maximum.