Vista Partition Resizing Mystery

March 28th, 2009

Let’s say you’re playing tech support for your loved ones.

Let’s then say that they have a laptop by ACER (Aspire 5050) which has ~100 GB hard drive with two partitions of about 50GB apiece.

Let’s then say that said loved one has never put data on the second partition out of ignorance (the kind of ignorance divorced from shame).

You _could_ repartition the hard drive by first deleting the unused partition and expanding the primary partition using the Disk Manager.

But, if you get this error “cannot be converted to dynamic or the volume being extended is a boot or system volume” when you try to expand the primary partition, don’t fret.

Simply _shrink_ the drive. I did it by two bytes. When the disk manager returned from that dialog, it took up the whole 100 GB. It’s a bug, but when a bug does something useful it’s called a feature.

Btw, I’m sorry you’re working on a loved one’s computer.


Discussion¬

  1. Bill S says:
    March 28, 2009 at 4:41 pm

    Yes, that’s exactly what I wound up doing. The D: was completely empty while the C: had some photos, which I saved to disc.

    Thank you for your kind thoughts. She sadly passed before she had a chance to really use the computer.

    Anyhow, the delete D: and expand C: via Disk Manager process was incredibly easy. I’m amazed that this solution is stickied at the top of the Acer forums — I can’t be the only one having this issue. Or maybe people are working around it?

    The dumbs dumbs on email support wanted me to buy Partition Magic — they had no knowledge of Vista’s Disk Manager.