Help! Installed SSD Switched SATAs HP Recovery Using Up Partition

I did some upgrades to my HP Pavilion H8-1012C (increased to 500W power supply and added 120GB Intel 320 SSD) Instead of playing with boot order I switched SATA spots with the original hdd on the motherboard. I turned off system recovery for the SSD drive and turned it on for the hdd. When I open computer, the partition for system recovery is in the red for disc space. It's a 2 TB drive so space should not be an issue but I'm a noob at this stuff and I know I'm missing something. I have boot discs thanks to Acronis and also back up to an external drive. What am I doing wrong, I think it's partitions but as I said, I'm a noob to upgrades so I come here.

I used Acronis True Image 2012 to clone drives. I suspect that software has a fix for me but damned if I can figure it out.

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

I'm not exactly sure what you are asking. Can you explain how you have your drives partitioned? The 320SSD is your OS correct. And how many partitions are on the 2TB? How big is the recovery partition?

Maybe take a screenshot of the Disk Management window and attach it to a post here or upload it to a picture site and give a link. Vista/7 just type disk management in the Search box.

 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/12107462@N08/6591279851/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/12107462@N08/6591282399/

The red line is what caught my eye. I think I partitioned things incorrectly, or I had Acronis partition things incorrectly. Thanks for looking into it.

 

Hi,

It looks like that H: drive is the factory recovery partition. It is used to restore the PC to factory (out of the box) condition. I don't think it is being actively written to as a backup because it is so small 11gb. You don't have to worry about it being red because HP just wanted to make it as small as possible to hold the necessary files.

I believe that it was originally a hidden partition so perhaps you are only seeing it now because it has been assigned a drive letter after the HD was moved from primary position to secondary.

If you like you could hide both drives F: and H: since you will not be writing to them. That way they won't show in Computer but will still be accessible through Disk Management. If you choose to hide them just right click the drive in Disk Management and choose Change Drive Letter, then in the window click the Remove button (it just removes the drive letter in Windows--no files are changed). If you want to see them again, go back to Disk Management and Change Drive Letter and click Add button and then choose an unused letter.

Another note even with no drive letter assigned to the current F: drive, if you ever wanted to boot from the old HD, Windows would still be able to read the boot files. I hide my System Reserved partition and if you look you will see yours is hidden (no drive letter) on the SSD drive.

 

Sorry to resurrect the thread but I'm denied private messages.

I thanked you with a click, sach2 but wanted to also thank you with words. I appreciate you looking at this for me and easing my mind. Best wishes!

 

You are very welcome!

I didn't say but I, personally, would remove the drive letters on F: and H:. No point in having them show in Computer when you will never write to them.

If you ever need to do a factory restore, you would move the 2tb drive back to primary and it would restore to that drive. I believe hitting F11 during boot up is the sequence to begin restore. You probably won't be doing that if you are using Acronis but I thought I would mention it.