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Unable to create D: drive after DELL Factory Recovery restore on 1TB drive in Inspiron 15R
I am posting this for benefit of anyone else who has same problem, as I could not find an answer anywhere on web searches that matched my exact problem.
The hard drive (*** 640MB) failed on my Inspiron 15R (N5010). (Disappointing after only 5 years just sitting on my desk). Anyway, found instructions on net to replace hard drive. Bought a 1TB drive and installed. (Would be nice if DELL had easy access to replace hard drive). Reinstalled Windows by booting to the original DELL Datasafe Bacxkup Recovery disks for factory restore that I created when I originally bought my DELL. This all worked fine (Thankyou DELL). Downloaded and installed Windows 7 SP1, and then all Windows 7 Updates (over 200 since SP1)! (Note I did have a Windows System Image Recovery Backup, but as I did this after disk failure started, it may have been corrupt, which is why I decided to rebuild from factory restore recovery disks).
Then I looked at Disk Management and found I only had a very small logical D: drive (2MB) I think.
I deleted this, thinking I would simply be able to create a new D: drive in the 800 odd GB I had spare on my 1TB drive. But Disk Management said could not create New Simple Volume, as maximum number of partitions already existed. After much research and reading, I used the Windows DISKPART utility. By select DISK 0, and LIST PARTITION, I found there was still the Extended Partition of about 2MB following the C: partition. This had a Partition number of 0. (This does not show up at all in Disk Management)! So in DISKPART, I did SELECT PARTITION 0, then DELETE PARTITION. I was then able to go back into Disk Management and right click on Unallocated space to right of C: partition and create D: Drive to use rest of my 1TB hard drive.
As another observation, after using the DELL Recovery Disks to recover onto a larger hard drive, there is 5.55GB of Unallocated space after the initial OEM partition, and before the Recovery and C: Partitions. I suspect this happens with the DELL recovery, because it was onto a 1TB drive and not a 640GB drive. I'm just leaving this as is.
Philip_Yip
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July 22nd, 2015 00:00
Normally I would suggest reinstalling with Dell DataSafe Local Backup as these programs don't like manual changes for partitions and then installing Dell Backup and Recovery version 1.8.1.71. This will allow you to make new Recovery Media which has fixes and enhancements in particular when installing on a different size of drive...
However since Windows 10 is out in less than a week you are best to use your install to upgrade to Windows 10 via Windows Update and then make a Recovery Drive to Clean Reinstall with.
See my testing here from the Windows 10 Insider Preview to Windows 10 RTM 10240 for more details:
http://dellwindowsreinstallationguide.com/windows-10-rtm/windows-insiders-%E2%86%92-getting-windows-10-rtm/
http://dellwindowsreinstallationguide.com/windows-10-rtm/creating-a-recovery-drive-and-using-it-in-windows-10/
Tuzzaman
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July 22nd, 2015 04:00
Thank you Philip. Yes, my original backup when I first bought my DELL laptop was made with DELL Datasafe Local Backup version 9.3.74.
I had seen from other posts on Windows 10, the expected feature of being able to make a USB Recovery Drive to re-install. This will be a great feature in Windows 10 (just like we have been doing on mainframes for years to have a boot "tape" with all fixes included)! I guess MS had to implement something like this, now that they are going to roll out new releases by Update...after the free 1 year period, if your hard drive broke, how would you ever recover?
I will file a link to your article for when I eventually upgrade to Windows 10...I will wait a while to let the dust & any other bugs settle, and then do a lot of reading before upgrading.
Thanks again for your comments, which gives me some confidence that eventual upgrade to Windows 10 on my DELL Inspiron 15R will be reasonably hassle free.
jarala
3 Posts
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July 22nd, 2015 22:00
in rationale, it can't appear such problem, and it is very special. You can use AOMEI OneKey Recovery to backup system, after restoring, you can splite and allocate space in you way.