HDD Cloning and Re-partitoning

[antispam246]

I previously posted about the best way to upgrade my hard disks.

I've used Acronis Migrate to successfully clone my OS's disk on my Windows 2003 Server. This had a dual boot of Windows 2003 and Win XP. Everything has worked successfully. I cloned to a larger disk and manually increased the partition sizes where I needed.

HOWEVER, I overlooked one thing. I did not use all the disk space on my new disk. So now I have 4 unallocated partitions which I can't seem to be able to do anything with. Windows 2003 Disk Management won't let me do anything with them and I can't find any partition software that works on Windows 2003 Server that will allow me to make use of them.

Ideally, I want to merge these 4 unallocated spaces into one, the problem there is, I think, they are all in different sectors of the disk. I can't extend them onto existing volumes because they're not dynamic and I don't want to convert to a dynamic disk.

So, what is my best option to merge these 4 unallocated spaces into one so I can then create a new partition from them? Despite what I said before I don't actually want to merge them with exisitng volumes I want to merge them and create a new volume.

Unless anyone has any better ideas, what I'm thinking of doing is basically starting over from scratch. I will remove my new hard disk and reinsert the original drive, reconnect the new disk as a slave and re-clone it again with Acronis Migrate. This time round I will use all the unallocated space to extend the WINXP partition as Migrate allows you to manually adjust the volume sizes during cloning. That way all the unallocated space will be distributed to an existing volume.

Once it's complete I intend to remove WINXP so I will simply format the WINXP partition and create a new one which should include all the unallocated space.

If I get this far and it works I have one further query, or check before I do. WINXP is my secondary OS. What's the best way to go about removing it? If I simply format that partition will it effect the MBR? Should I also be doing something, some changes to the MBR when removing a secondary OS or will a simply format suffice?

 

[antispam246]

Ok to update and answer myself for the benefit of anyone else researching this. I've basically resolved everything except the last query.

I started voer as I suggested with Acronis Migrate. Set original HDD as master and the replacement HDD as slave, re-cloned. I looked abit closer at the Migrate software, it was actually very simple in the end, when you re-allocate space using the manual setting you can literally slide the bar where it shows the partitions to move a partition up or down along the disk sectors so basically i moved all the partitons down to the start of the disk until all the unallocated space was at the end then added it onto my XP volume. That was it, worked like a charm.

Even repeated the same process on my other pc for HDD upgrade and again, worked a charm.

Coming back to my Server, I'm still curious as to the best way to rid myself of Windows XP which is currently my secondary OS on a dual boot. Can I merely format the drive and use it as I wish or should I be preparing the boot record in some way to ensure I don't have any errors when starting up windows?

 

[antispam246]

In the end I simply removed the start up line from boot.ini and formated the XP drive, cheers.