Hard drive problem after windows 7 install attempt?

Question

My computer is an HP Media Center running Vista Home Premium. I has two separate hard drives each with 360GBs. I recently tried to install Windows 7 on the second drive but the installation failed. Despite saying it needed no input from me it went into a loop. I tried to uninstall it. I also had to change the Start Menu to 'Selective Start' because otherwise it tried to boot into Windows 7 and failed every time. I now have only 235GBs on each drive. No clean up or reformatting of the second drive has any effect and no matter what clean up program I try I can not improve the capacity of the drives to the original specification. I am not concerned so much about having lost 25GBs on both drives as to what is in the missing space. I plan to buy the final version of Windows 7 shortly and would prefer to clean up after the last failure. I still have to keep on 'Selective Start'. I will appreciate any help I can get. JohnW

Answer 1

You may be able to use partition magic to increase the size of the partition or get rid of the Windows 7 partition. That way you would have a clean slate to start from.

Answer 2

I would recommend using a live CD partitioner, such as GParted LIVE CD to remove all partitions and erase all data on the hard drives, leave them blank (without any partitions), and then install Windows 7 again.

Answer 3

You should be able to rectify this using the built in Disk Management console within Windows. See example screenshot below.

1. Right-click Computer and select Manage
2. Expand Disk Management
3. From there, you can visually see your partitions and you should have the option to expand partitions into empty space.

When you say selective start, are you referring to the menu asking which operating system you want to boot into, when you first switch on? If so, take a look here as it shows you how to fix this and set it back to just Vista.