Partition Shifting

So after cloning the hard disk drive I ran into two issues.  The first being that cloning from a 250GB HDD to a 320 GB HDD meant that I now had lots of wasted space, and I want to use that.  The second is that Windows doesn't really like to be cloned, and started nagging me that it was no longer genuine.  I will deal with that solution later.

To make use of all of that new space on the larger HDD I needed to adjust the partitions.  This can be a daunting task because if I were to mess with the boot partition or somehow ruin the partition with Windows installed on it, I would be back to cloning again to get a workable HDD.  I installed gparted (Gnome Partition Editor) onto my Rescue USB stick, because I have installed Ubuntu Linux many times before I was comfortable with using this tool.  Windows 7 also has a partition editor included as well, which I had to make use of because in gparted it was flagged and said I needed ntfs-progs to resize.  Reading some forums after I got things where I wanted them by using both partition tools I see many warning to not use gparted on Windows Vista/7 or later.

Since my laptop was supposed to ship with Windows 7 but came with Vista instead I ended up with extra partitions, since there was an original recovery partition and the upgrade disks Lenovo sent ended up adding another parition.  Ideally this will let a user just use the One Key recovery to restore a working Operating System in event of wrecking your system.  I think the upgrade from Vista to 7 ruined this ability, as I have never been able to use One Key recovery.  So I deleted the Vista recovery partition.  The Windows partition tool is limited to 4 partitions.  I thought deleting this would allow me to move the other partition to the end and add all the space to the main partition (C:\).  The Windows tool doesn't allow moving partitions though.  So I dropped into gparted to move that. Then I used the Windows Partition tool to resize the main partition with all of the new space from the deleted partition and the space from having a larger hard drive.

For getting to and using the Windows Partition Tool this article at How-to Geek is helpful Resize a Partition Free in Windows 7 or Vista and for help with Gparted their documents are helpful Gparted Manual.