Remove eRecovery Partition

I have created DVD's with the recovery tool. Can I now use one of the tools to remove the eRecovery partition and expand the c:\ drive into the space. I know it will make it more difficult in the event of a problem but I would like the few extra Gigs.

 

Acronis Disk Director can delete the eRecovery partition, and then expand the C: directory.

 

I am trying to determine the answer to that today by doing it on a test machine today. Will report the results later.

 

I am thinking of using Easeus Partition Master as it is free. It is installed already and ready to go but my heart has started missing beats already at the thought of not being able to boot again :shock:

 

I have done it with Acronis Disk Director, it is a five minute operation.

Always make a backup image before making changes. I use Acronis True Image, which can bakcup an image in 15 minutes.

 

A little off topic, but I'll write it anyway
I recommend Easeus Partition Manager, I've had no problems so far and it is free and powerful. I also recommend Partition Image. It's a free DOS tool for backing up and restoring partitions.
I've got an AAO with 8GB SSD and everyone here knows what a pain it is to install XP on it. It's slow as molasses and creating a XP USB stick is complex. I test a lot and I often trash my system and damage it beyond repair so that I need a fresh installation. To save some(actually much) time I did the following:
I installed XP pro with all drivers and software I use.
I installed Easeus Partition Manager, shrunk the system partition to 3GB and created a secondary Partition(it's best to have a partition for data when using EWF on the first disk).
I created a bootable USB stick with unetbootin and integrated a MSDOS 7.10 disk image I edited with a bootmenu and put Pimage in.
I stripped the USB stick and soldered it to CN11 on the mainboard.
I booted to this USB drive and backed up the freshly installed system partiton with Pimage.
So now when I have broken my XP installation I boot to the USB drive, select 'DOS prompt' for manual repair or 'Restore XP' for restoring the system Partition(Partition Image allows automatic restoring through commands in an .ini file).
It takes about 10 minutes now for a fresh XP with my main programs preinstalled including EWF and all
In XP the USB drive is disabled so that I can't trash it from there

 

WOW Mali, There was a thread awhile back where people were asking for a method that does this.

Would you consider doing a new thread on this subject? Breaking this method down with links etc, so a dummy like me could follow?

Thanks

 

I don't know if I can reconstruct where I got the files from, especially the DOS 7.10 disk image. I don't think its legal to post a link(if I remember where I got it, that is)
I think the unetbootin stuff is from Macles site(it's used to create a bootable USB stick for BIOS updates there).
Partition Image is here:
http://www.lab1.de/Central/Software/Sys ... ion_Image/
Unfortunately it's in German.
Partition Manager:
http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm
You also need dd to create an image of the adapted DOS disk:
http://www.chrysocome.net/dd
You need a virtual disk drive utility to open the DOS disk image and edit it(put a start menu in config.sys and autoexec.bat and include pimage.exe and its .ini-file)
The instructions for creating an XP installation USB stick I found on this board(didn't work for me though, because I had an OEM disk first. I mixed the procedure with instructions from an eee-pc site). But I suppose, that most people here already have a USB installation stick or have other ways to install XP.

So when you have got the files ready, open the virtual floppy drive and mount the image.
Edit config.sys and autoexec.bat to include a start menu(instructions on the web http://users.cybercity.dk/~bse26236/bat ... MMANDS.HTM)
Copy Pimage.exe to the disk(I reconfigured the disk image after I had successfully made a partition backup and included an .ini for automatic restore(see Partition Image homepage for instructions))
When the disk is edited and everything is how you want it, create a new image of the disk with dd.
open unetbootin and select the image you've created with dd and create the USB stick.
For Partition Image to work correctly you should format the USB stick to FAT16
Boot from the stick to test if everything works and make a backup of your partition(after you have made the changes with Easeus Partition Master, of course . Partition Master can be controlled intuitively)
Now you can edit the image again and add an .ini for Partition Image(remember which partition to restore, and where the image is). Unetbootin puts the DOS disk image in a RAM disk, so you can put the backed up image of your partition on the rest of the USB stick if it is large enough, which is supposedly called c:. The bootdisk is a:
After a successful backup and restore test you can strip the stick and solder it directly to the board. That way you can't lose it and don't accidently use it for something else(it's best to disable it in XP hardware manager then)

So if anyone wants to try, he/she could make a step by step guide and include what I have forgotten I've written this out of my memory after all
For those who don't speak German or don't want to translate Partition Image instructions with google translator or similar, there might be other DOS utilities out there, I suppose.

 

If you have an external hard drive and an external CD/DVD writer then you can run Clonzilla from the CD/DVD drive and backup an image of your Windows disk onto the external hard drive. I am still testing if the first partition backup image as a stand alone back for the factory restore. I made the backup image and when I tried to restore it to a blank drive and found it did not work as it created a partition called (I think) PQS partition or something like that and a very small other partition. The problem seems to be the partitions are not the right size. I tried to resize the PQS partition and create a second partition but it didn't work. I am thinking that when I resized it something went wrong. I will try again tomorrow starting with a blank disk with 2 partitions one 8 Gb for the PQS partition and the rest formated for Windows. Then restore the PQS partition and see if it will then restore to factory settings.