Reformatting and Partitions

[Stuart Cowan]

My Pc has been come crippled with large amounts of spyware that make
using the PC more and more diffcult each day. I was planning to
complete a full system reformat, or system recovery as my manufacturer
describes it. The PC was shipped with two drive C and D, both being a
partition of one hard drive. I also added 3 further partitions to D,
which means there are actually 5 drives.

The computer manual says that when performing a system recovery, you
can select to just recover the C partition, but it says that a recovery
will provide an image of the PC's software when shipped, so does this
mean it will restore the original partitions and lose my current
partitions?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Kind Regards

Stuart

 

[Ron Sommer]

Have you made C smaller than the original size?
An image would restore to a partition of the same size or larger than the
image.
Restoring an image should not affect other partitions.

 

[John Barnett MVP]

Ron, I have an E-Machine which came with a set of 3 recovery cd. My hard
drive is also partitioned into 3 partitions. When i use the recovery disks
to reinstall the operating system on my C: partition it wipes out the whole
hard drive. The reason being is that the recovery disk(s) allocate 'all' of
the hard drive for the C: partition. Any other partitions you may have put
on the hard drive will be lost (unless the pc manufacturer tells you
different) In my case, after reinstalling, i use partition magic to reduce
the C: drive, then create new partitions and (because i have imaged copies
of my other operating systems (using drive image (now norton ghost)) i can
reimage my other operating systems back to the newly created partitions on
the main hard drive.

 

[ByTor]

My Pc has been come crippled with large amounts of spyware that make
using the PC more and more diffcult each day. I was planning to
complete a full system reformat, or system recovery as my manufacturer
describes it. The PC was shipped with two drive C and D, both being a
partition of one hard drive. I also added 3 further partitions to D,
which means there are actually 5 drives.

The computer manual says that when performing a system recovery, you
can select to just recover the C partition, but it says that a recovery
will provide an image of the PC's software when shipped, so does this
mean it will restore the original partitions and lose my current
partitions?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Kind Regards

Stuart

Stu, my thoughts are exactly as John states.....In the real world of
full retail installs an image of that restored will resize itself to
just fill the allocated space you specify.......In the case of these
proprietary restore CD's they may just wipe out your entire drive
bringing it to the factory state.......

If it gives you an actual option to just restore there than I wouldn't
see a problem with it.....But than again I have a HP that I messed with
once and had 4 OS partitions on it, decided to use the restore CD and it
wiped the "whole" drive.............

The manual seems to clearly state an option, but if I were you I would
back up your data and than give it a go.......Resizing & creating new
partitions after is another whole matter though and needs third party
partitioning software as windows is only able to create partitions in
unallocated space & not manipulate them........John basically covered
this with his explanation.........

Personally, I'd rather own my own copy of an OS than deal with the
proprietary nonsense....But that's me, as I can do what I see fit with
the OS......I wiped out the HP of it's pre-installed OS and put my
own.....Than again if you still have your warranty/tech support
available you have to have the original image installed to recieve
assistance.................Just a thought though.

 

[Stuart Cowan]

Well thanks to everyone for their help, I think just to be on the safe
side and to pre empt any problems with my teenage sister, I will just
back up all the data on to some nice shiny CD-Rs!

Many Thanks once again

Stuart

 

[ByTor]

Well thanks to everyone for their help, I think just to be on the safe
side and to pre empt any problems with my teenage sister, I will just
back up all the data on to some nice shiny CD-Rs!

Many Thanks once again

Stuart

Good luck......Post back on your results...........

 

[Plato]

My Pc has been come crippled with large amounts of spyware that make
using the PC more and more diffcult each day. I was planning to
complete a full system reformat, or system recovery as my manufacturer
describes it. The PC was shipped with two drive C and D, both being a
partition of one hard drive. I also added 3 further partitions to D,
which means there are actually 5 drives.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

First thing is to make sure you know the difference between drives
LETTERS and actual physical hard drives.