My brother's Acer Gemstone laptop has 100GB of free space in his recovery (D:/) partition that I would like to reassign to his boot (C:/) partition. The Vista (Home Premium) disk management utility shows that the D partition is located to the right of the C partition, so if I shrink D the unallocated space is placed off to the right meaning that C can't grow into it. What I could do is create a new partition from this unallocated space, Z, and copy the contents of D over to Z, then delete D and grow C into the space before finally renaming Z to D. This would leave me with a bigger C partition and a smaller D partition as if C had grown 'into' D. (An interesting, but probably minor point, is that there are two unnamed partitions: One off the left of C and one off to the right of D. I assume these are also recovery partitions that we don't question.) My concern is whether this is safe to do? Would the recovery manager get confused or would it figure it out (or allow the user to specify where to look)? Perhaps someone can recommend something that can do this safely without harming the potential for recovery later? Thanks

One alternative that bypasses the need to repartition the drive is to mount the recovery partition as a folder on C:\ (you can do this via diskmgmt.msc - right click the partition, then "change drive letters and paths").

Quote: Original post by dmatter
My concern is whether this is safe to do? Would the recovery manager get confused or would it figure it out (or allow the user to specify where to look)?


Thanks

I think it is important to note that there is no such thing as a "safe" partitioning procedure. Its kind of like surgery that way. If you are about to do anything to a drive with important data on it you should approach it with great caution and perhaps a small dose of fear.

benryves idea makes me far less nervous.