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[poppy]

Please can anyone advise on partitioning of hard drive?
Began with 160GB single partition - Vista.
Partitioned and ended up with 66GB for Linux. Installed it and partitioned 50% by Ubuntu.
Uninstalled Ubuntu by deletion in Vista, repaired and now booting up into Vista OK.
Situation now is that I have 113GB primary drive with 33.33 GB free space which is within the main C partition.
Can't make it into a simple volume as it keeps telling me I don't have enough space although the given space is 8MB to 34000MB.
If I delete it Windows tells me it will become inaccessible. Can't shrink it as it is part of the main drive.
How do I get rid of it to make the computer back to one partition? Wouldn't mind keeping it as a separate partition if it would do it.
When I put in my recovery disc it asks which section to install Windows on so I am no better off.
Any ideas please? Would be most grateful as have posted on my ISP forum but no advice forthcoming yet.

[roseway]

Maybe you need to defrag the partition first?

[poppy]

No, it is a brand new hard drive with nothing on it except Vista.  Even so, I did defragment it more than once before trying the experiment.
Any suggestions gratefully received as I really want to sort it.
Now resolved.

[oldfogy]

Began with 160GB single partition - Vista.
How do I get rid of it to make the computer back to one partition?

As Vista has the facility to "Merge Partitions" this should make it easier than installing a Partitioning program such as "Acronis or Paragon Partition Manager" (or one of the many other programs available)

>> If I delete it Windows tells me it will become inaccessible.
Yes, because basically there will not be anything on it, "until it is re-formatted"
So first of all I would try the delete method you mention above and then try the Vista merge options.

All being well you should then end-up back with your original 160GB drive.

[poppy]

Thank you for your help Old Fogy. The option to merge didn't seem to be there. Was told that Windows plays up with partitions made by other OSs.
I wish that I had waited for your reply and given it a go but in the end I fixed it by a very circuitous way.
Installed Kubuntu over the whole disc.  Alas,  I quickly discovered that I don't have what it takes to tackle a different OS so I tried to go back to Vista, which I couldn't because it wasn't NTFS formatted.
Ended up reformatting it with a full XP disk that I have then went back to Vista (recovery disk only so couldn't reformat with that).
All is working now and I have a complete C partition of about 145 GB - not sure what happened to the extra bit.
Have ended up with an Old Windows folder now but I had this before so I am not sure if it is the XP or from the recovery disk itself.
I did wonder what would have happened if I had removed the XP disk at the point that it had completed the reformat and then inserted the Vista disk.
Would like to delete the old windows folder but need to Google it to see if it is possible.
No more messing about for me I am afraid (well, at least for now).

[oldfogy]

> All is working now and I have a complete C partition of about 145 GB - not sure what happened to the extra bit.

You had a 160GB HDD to start with.
Was this 16GB the size you could see in either "My Computer or Explorer?
or is that the size that you were told that the HDD was?

A new HDD of 160GB before it is installed will actually only show a size of around 144GB after being installed.
(160 minus 10% (7.5 to be accurate) so 160 minus 16 = 144GB) "I usually say 10% because it is easier to work out mentally"
(It has to do with a 1GB = 1024MB and not 1000MB) confusing but this is quite normal.

Also the recovery disc on the HDD which is then used after the CD is inserted also takes-up space, although this is usually a hidden partition and is only visible when opening the "Disk Management program"

Have you had a look in Disk Management to see what Partitions are being shown and are active?
As you may will still be able to recover any partition that has not been "activated"

For XP:-
Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Disk manager

**************
> Was told that Windows plays up with partitions made by other OSs.
Never heard that before and have never had a problem using third party partitioning programs.

[HPsauce]

It has to do with a 1GB = 1024MB and not 1000MB

Just being pedantic it's due to disk drives being "measured" in powers of 1,000 so 1GB = 1,000,000,000 Bytes,
whereas Windows works in powers of 2, with K=2**10 (1024) M=2**20(1024*1024) and G=2**30 (1024*1024*1024).
The difference, as noted above, is about 7.5% (actually 1,000,000,000 vs 1,073,741,824).

[roseway]

> Was told that Windows plays up with partitions made by other OSs.
Never heard that before and have never had a problem using third party partitioning programs.

Windows doesn't seem to want to have anything to so with partitions which have been formatted with filesystems which it doesn't support, such as Linux partitions.