C drive partition problem

[Nutsyaish]

I have recently reinstalled windows using HP recovery DVDs in my notebook. Now I am presented with the following volumes with their respective free space in it - system (165 mb), Recovery (D drive:1.56 gb), HP tools (89 mb) and C drive (around 650 gb). There are two inter related problems that I am facing.

1. Owing to the huge space in C drive, I needed to create a single partition in it and get another drive (say F drive) which would be of roughly 575 gb where I can save all my personal data. When I use disk management to create a partition in C drive, the maximum size that I am getting for F drive after shrinking C: is only around 145 gb (the shrink C: pop up window says that this is the max size of available shrink space that can be used) and the remaining size wil be with C: itself !

What is going wrong ?How can I change this size constraint ?

For convenience, I dont want more partitions for my personal data.

2. Also, though I had taken back up of all my data before using the recovery DVDs in an external hard disc, unfortunately the hard disc itself got malfunctional. I read somewhere online that recovery of the lost/formatted data is still possible through some online softwares from the system itself. But for that to happen, I need to have the internal hard drives of the system in exactly the same way as it was before formatting so that the software to retreive data functions effectively. Hence, this also necessiates me to have a single separate drive for data exclusively.  Is this actually possible ?

I need atleast 500 gb space in a single drive after partition where I can dump all my retreived data.

As you can see, both the issues are interconnected and I would love to get a combined solution for it.

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

Nutsyaish

Hello;

Allow me to welcome you to the HP forums!

Sorry to read about your problems -- let's deal with them in order ...

First, regarding the partitioning, your disk is partitioned using something known as MBR partitioning and this limits the number of upper-level partitions to four -- which you already have.  There is no way around this, as this is a HARD limit of the MBR partitioning scheme.

While you can not ADD another partition, you can resize and reuse the existing partitions to allow you to have a data partition.  To do that, you would need to do the following:

1) Copy all the contents of the HP_TOOLS partition into a folder on your C: partition

2) Go to the Minitool Partition Wizard site, download their Boot CD image, grab a blank CD, and burn that image to the CD -- you will need this to boot the PC outside of Windows.

3) After you have downloaded the ISO file, you can use RUFUS to create the bootable CD.

4) Boot from the partitioning CD you made

5) Remove the HP_TOOLS partition

6) Shrink down the C partition to leave room for your new partition

7) Create your new partition in the unallocated space.

Second, recovering data from a drive requires two things:

1) Removing the drive from your PC and connecting it to another PC

2) Downloading and installing a data recovery application on the other PC

Your best bet for recovering data now is to do the following:
1) Remove the hard drive from the PC
2) Purchase a USB-to-Hard Driver adapter kit
3) Download and install this utility on a working PC: http://www.majorgeeks.com/news/story/recover_data_in_3_steps_with_minitool_power_data_recovery_free_...
4) Connect the old drive to the working PC
5) Run the data recovery utility to see what can be retrieved from the old drive.

If that tools does not find what you need, an alternative is Recuva: http://www.piriform.com/recuva

And, if that does not work well, the best tool out there is this one, but only the trial version is free: http://www.file-recovery.com/

Good Luck

[Nutsyaish]

Hi

Apologies for replying and thanking you so late. I had lost the login id and pasword of the forum accidentally (written on a sheet of paper) which I fortunately found out today. Hence, the late reply.

Your suggestion worked. I was able to use piriform recuva successfully.  was a bit slow but still it was worth the effort.

Thanks again