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I can not find an answer to this - even from several people I know on the tech side. Dual booting Windows 7 and 8. Windows 7 is the OEM Gateway box. My drive looks like this:

PQService (Primary) System Reserved (Primary, active) Windows 7 (Primary) Windows 8 (Boot, Crash dump, LOGICAL)

I want to remove Win7 and convert the Win8 Logical to Primary. I was thinking I could remove the PQService, which is a backup for Win7 but I'm not sure. The small, 100MB System reserved is the only partition which shows active, making this even more confusing.

I'd like to end up with: System Reserved, Windows 8

Any thoughts on how to safely get there? Thank you!

Hennes
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user302915
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  • Do an image backup of Windows 8, destroy all partitions, make new ones as you want, restore image backup. – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007 Feb 24 '14 at 18:19
  • OK. I have the image for Windows 8 in a passport drive. You're saying I can restore that to a Primary partition? Need to set the Boot Order to USB. Is that right? – user302915 Feb 24 '14 at 19:20

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You might not want to get rid of PQService. It doesn't harm you, and might even help you. Unless you NEED the space.

The System Reserved is meant to be the active partition - it contains the windows boot manager which can load any Windows >6.0 from any partition. Keep it.

You could delete the windows 7 partition : But you can't easily resize your windows 8 partition towards the left. You need a partition manager and it takes ages.

A better idea is to just delete the partition (after taking out whatever you need) and create a fresh partition there to hold data.

Milind R
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  • When you install Windows Vista/7/8/8.1 it will create a system reserved partition if needed. So if you are going to delete both windows partitions I would also advise deleting the system reserved partition as well to keep the boot manager in there clear of any info about the old partitions. – BeowulfNode42 Feb 24 '14 at 18:34
  • The PQService partition sounds like a system manufacturer partition that allows you to return the system to an out of the box state. Have you made a set of system manufacturer DVDs yet? If you have then you can always use those instead of the PQService partition. – BeowulfNode42 Feb 24 '14 at 18:37
  • I want to remove Windows 7 and keep Windows 8. Windows 8 resides on the Logical partition. I have Partition Manager software to convert the Logical to Primary since the PC won't boot to a Logical partition/drive, right? Guess I want to make sure I'm going the right direction. Thanks. – user302915 Feb 24 '14 at 18:43
  • @BeowulfNode42 from windows 7 onwards it always creates a system reserved partition. The boot manager does not depend on the partition layout stored with itself (like grub does). It consults the drive's partition table for it. – Milind R Feb 24 '14 at 18:43
  • If you are going to try and move around the partitions. You will need a windows system recovery disk to fix up the boot information after you move around your partitions, make this first. The [ubuntu desktop](http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop) CD is a bootable [LiveCD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_CD) with the partitioning tool called gparted. Then use the Windows system recovery boot disk you made earlier to fix up the boot manager to look at the right place for your windows. – BeowulfNode42 Feb 24 '14 at 18:43
  • @user302915 the system reserved partition contains the boot manager. Since it is the active partition, it gets booted, which can then boot windows from any partition, even logical. – Milind R Feb 24 '14 at 18:46
  • @MilindR the reason I mentioned deleting the system reserved was to avoid a situation where the bootrec information in there does not match the rest of the system and it doesn't boot like on http://superuser.com/questions/358651/bootmgr-is-missing-usual-fixes-dont-work – BeowulfNode42 Feb 24 '14 at 18:48
  • @BeowulfNode42 I am unsure of that. From my digging into bootmgr, it only shows drive and partition imfo as numbers and letters. Internally, it stores almost all of it as GUIDs. In that case I think the issue was that he chose the wrong drive as system drive which didn't actually have `bootmgr` in it. – Milind R Feb 24 '14 at 18:57
  • Appreciate all the good comments. The system works fine as is but I no longer use Windows 7 so want to dump it. Found conflicting info online about being able to boot to a Logical "drive" so I was concerned about deleting everything and then not being able to boot up. I have a system image of the System Reserved, active partiion and Windows 8. I'll post back and let you know how it goes. Thanks again. – user302915 Feb 25 '14 at 14:19