Format C drive with that has operating system installed
Microsoft Vista Ultimate SP2 (32bit) This computer has a Rack and Tray System which allows me to swap the hard drives that have the operating system installed on them. This consists of a C partition and a D partition. Using Acronis 2009, build 9809, I create a new Full Backup each night. At the present time I am creating four copies of my C/D drive, deleting the oldest when the fifth copy is made. Every Sunday I swap the present drive for the other drive, and I restore the newest backup to this drive. By doing this I always have four Full Backups in reserve and if something happens to the drive that is presently being used I remove it from the rack and replace it with the other drive. If I need to I may remove this tray whenever needed. These two drives are numbers 1. and 2. shown below.
Last Sunday I had a situation where I started receiving messages, in the log for the latest Full Backup, that there were sector problems on the drive in use at that time. I removed that drive and replaced it with the other drive and I was back in business. I decided to replace the drive with the sector problems with a drive of a greater capacity, so I ordered two new drives from New Egg. The reason for two new drives was that when you use this rack and tray system, you need to have both drives configured alike, i.e. both have to be the same size.
Here are the drives that are in this computer.
1. 500 GB with two partitions C and D the drive with the sector problem.
2. 500 GB with two partitions C and D
3. 500 GB with two partitions E and F
I replaced number 1 and 2 with two 1TB drives. This left me with one good 500 GB drive to use elsewhere, I will call it drive 4., and one 500 GB to destroy. I want take drive 3 and change it to one partition which will be E, then I want to take drive 4 and mount it and partition it to one partition which will be F.
Here are my concerns and how I plan to accomplish what I propose above. Since drive 4 still has the operating system on it, Disk Manager cannot be used to reformat it. I plan on reformatting this drive using the system I found at:
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/tipstricks/ht/format-c-from-windows-disc… When I do this, I plan to take the drive that is in use at this time, either number 1 or 2, out of the computer so there won’t be any possibility of anything happening to it.
After I have finished the procedure above I am going to make a Full Manual Backup of drive 3. After this backup is made, I will reformat drive 3 so that it only has one partition on it, which will be E. I plan to do this using Disk Manager. Then, using the Full Manual Backup I created, I will install partition F on to drive 4. In all instances I will be using the Acronis Rescue Disk if possible.
Do you see anything that would not work, any flaws in my thinking? Any suggestions for a better, or easier, way to do this would be appreciated.
Your approach looks good.
You can also do partition management using diskpart from the windows installation DVD:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc766465%28WS.10%29.aspx