I have (Possibly) Extraneous partitions, can I delete them?

Question

I have an Acer Aspire 5732Z that is currently dual booting W7 and Ubuntu. It is partitioned into 3 primary partitions and 1 extended one that contains 4 logical ones. I am completely sure that the extended partition and the W7 partition are necessary how they are. The other two primary partitions are called "SYSTEM RESERVED" and "PQService".

I have heard about being able to remove PQService, but it all seems rather confusing and overly risky, deleting the MBR and hoping that Windows can recover.

Is there a way I could safely merge the two extra partitions, or a safe way to delete PQService? I want to make another partition for a Mac OS X installation, but Gparted says that I already have the limit. I have also tried to resize the extended partition and add a logical one to it for Mac, but it contains all of the Ubuntu files, and is unumountable, I don't know how to do it in windows.

Note: I have Plenty of space on my drive, I just reached the partition limit.

Edit: I don't have a functioning cd/dvd drive :(

Answer 1

Do not remove the "system reserved" partition, or else Win7 will not boot.

You could remove the "pqservice" partition IF AND ONLY IF you first burn backup/recovery CDs or DVDs, which will allow you to restore or initialize a (new) harddisk later on. The procedure for this would be under "recovery management" in the User's Manual.

Rather then use Win7 or Ubuntu as you have tried, I prefer to boot GParted from a LiveCD, in order to ensure no partitions are in use (i.e. mounted).

Answer 2

Because you don't have a CD or DVD drive, you don't have the option of removing the manufacturer's recovery partition. Similarly, you cannot remove the "system reserved" partition because it is the boot volume for Windows 7. But you've missed a trick.

The trick that you've missed is that since the "system reserved" is the Windows boot volume, the "main" Windows partition, as you've termed it, is the Windows system volume. The system volume, when the boot and system volumes are separate, does not have to be a primary partition. It can be a secondary partition within a container.

So you can reinstall Windows 7 so that it uses a secondary partition as its system volume (keeping the "system reserved" partition as its boot volume, of course). This frees up the fourth primary partition table entry.

Not that you really need the fourth primary partition table entry freeing up, mind you. You could just as equally move the container partition down into that free space and resize it to encompass the whole of the remainder of the DASD after the space occupied by the first three primary partitions, as indeed you were thinking of doing. There are plenty of partitioning utilities that run on Windows that are capable of moving ("sliding") the container partition, from Acronis Disk Director through EASEUS Partition Master to Paragon Partition Manager.

Answer 3

Based on your question, it really depends on where your partitions are. If your Windows 7 partition is on disk 0, and partition 1 (0 being that little partition the W7 install adds), you can probably delete or merge other partitions. If Windows 7 is loaded on partitions after, let's say 2,3 or 4, and you merge partitions before it, you will alter the boot configuration, and it will not boot. You will then need to run BCDEDIT and edit the boot configuration. This has the same function as the boot.ini did in XP and before. I am not sure how it will affect your Linux.

So I would be very careful unless you are comfortable with BCDEDIT and troubleshooting.