2 days ago, my friend received his first HP personal laptop. It had a Intel i5 M430 processor, ATI 5450 graphics card with 512 MB dedicated graphics, a 500 GB 7200RPM HDD with one huge C: partition, a recovery partition and HP Tools partition.
The friend wanted me to create multiple partitions for him like I did on my laptop for optimal performance. So, I started doing it for him but after a few failures realized that it was a 64 bit OS and it needed a different version of the software I have been using all these years.(Paragon Partition Manager). While trying to create the partitions I lost all the existing partitions. This post is about how I recovered the system to a working state from a non-working state.
How the situation arrived:
The HDD had a HP Tools partition, a recovery partition with a .wim file and other system files which restored back to how it was before and a C: drive with the rest of the HDD space for windows 7 home premium.
I installed Paragon Partition manager 9 to resize the C: drive which already had the windows OS installed. But this software failed because it was a software not built for the 64 bit systems. So I used the EASEUS partition manager software and resized the windows partition (C:) to the required size and freeing up the rest of the space, without needing to reinstall the OS.
Next step was to create the other required partitions (D, E , F ....etc). This wasn't happening as expected. Both the softwares were not allowing me to create more partitions out of the unallocated space on the hard disk. So after a lot of time waste doing trials, I ended up using the Windows inbuilt partition manager (Start-> right click (my computer)-> manage -> disk management ) to create the rest of the partitions. Before making the changes it warned us that we will be not able to boot from any other partition other than the one we are currently in. i.e. If we have other OS we will not be able to get in, because it was going to convert the partitions into DYNAMIC partitions.
I then thought, we do not have any other OS so just lets go ahead with this. But, I was wrong. After restarting the PC, we not only lost the recovery feature provided by HP but also lost the windows which was working fine.
I was in a situation where I couldn't restore windows to its previous state or restore from the recovery partition but had to get this working for him. I took it as my responsibility to restore it to working state because I corrupted it.
The time taking process of restoring:
First thing needed to reinstall the windows was to have a recovery disc which we didn't have. So, I googled for Windows 7 Home premium x64 ISO free and downloaded the available free ISO and burned it to a disc and installed the windows in his pc. It was working fine but with lots of missing drivers and missing functionalities what he got when he first received the laptop.
The dynamic partitions that were created were giving lots of problems in restoring the recovery partitions. I tried various methods to restore the .wim file from that partitions and write that image back to the C: to get back the version which was originally provided. After a lot of trials I managed to retrieve the wim file from the recovery partition which was inaccessible. Then tried to write it to the C: but this didn't work.
First thing was to find a 64bit version of the imagex application that is used to apply the image onto a partition. So googling for it got me the version I needed. After applying the retrieved image to the C: , it still didn't work as expected. I kept getting errors about boot errors 0x000000f. I tried various methods to fix this (bootrec.exe to fixmbr and diskpart.exe to re-partition) but no success. I even tried ubuntu and fedore live discs to use their disk partitioning utility but all were leading me to a state where I would have to delete the recovery partition completely. (I needed this partition to recover and be available in the future to my friend for recovery).
I then after lot of thinking re-installed windows 7 again and deleted the D E F ...etc partitions due to which the disk converted into dynamic disk. I looked into Google to convert a dynamic disk to a basic disk type and read a lot of articles on how and what dynamic and basic disk types are and how they effect performance and functionality and customization . Then converted the disk type to basic and tried to restore the .wim again but that again corrupted the master boot record.
After all this failures and the time being 11 PM on Saturday, I decided to install the the windows again and make it working for him without trying to restore from the wim image. I installed windows 7 home premium without any problems this time and was able to successfully find all the drivers and created all the partitions he wanted and was able to reactivate windows this time by calling the Microsoft product activation hotline.
Conclusion:
I wasted a lot of time ( almost 24 hours) on fixing this nonsense issue which I have fixed many times in the past. I could have done what I did at the end much earlier than when I actually did it but I wanted to experiment on this new x64 environment so it was worth the time spent. Basically I finished what I was working on and result was positive. :) Working Windows 7 with genuine software in it :)
What I learnt and enjoyed:
- I waste a lot of time fixing things which I know how to fix because I look for perfection.
- Microsoft has started providing free legal downloadable ISO since Windows 7
- Learnt new things about the partitioning systems (Dynamic disk and basic disk types)
- Got exposure towards Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK)
- Learnt how imagex differs from dism and other tools provided in the Windows AIK
- Learnt that x64 systems will give you a lot of headache compared to x86 systems during software and driver related tasks.
- Realized that most of the new systems have USB device booting options. (previously only few had that)
- Just like when we moved from IDE to SATA disks we had issues with installing windows xp (because they didnt have SATA drivers by default) , the move from x86 to x64 systems have some issues with partitions, OS installations and software
- Got to brush up my skills on system maintenance and work on my favorite passtime/hobby
- Other things that I researched due to this "project" were
- Differences between i3 i5 and i7 processors and the differences between them and core 2 duo family.
- Differences between windows home , professional, ultimate (read again to remember better)
Overall I loved this waste of time. I could have done more important things but doing something what I love is better than doing something that I need to do is good for me, I think (at least right now thats what I think :p)
If you have any questions related this topic or any other topic please ask me. I know I haven't gone too much in detail about how I did everything here so please ask me if you want to know any more details. This was just to share my experience :)
Thank you for reading.
