Windows 10: Partition issue

Before i go about with my problem I need to ask if I am in the right forum wanting to get answers to my partition issue?
No sense in wasting both our time right?

:)

 

Partitioning issues

Windows set my D: drive to dynamic and won't let me change it back. I also cannot extend it because it says there is not any free space even though I have 168GBs of unallocated. It will also not let me set D: as my primary partition on the drive.

 

Partitioning issues

Might look around at tenforums;

Dynamic disk created in error...how to remove - Windows 10 Forums

 

Hi,

Welcome to Tenforums,

Yes this is the right place to ask of any sort of partition or hardware related issues.

 

Thank you so much for the quick response.. OK so basically here is what happened. ...after not using my laptop for practically 10 weeks I pulled it out of the laptop bag, turned it on only to find that my keyboard no longer worked and the 2 USB ports on the right side of the laptop weren't working either. (Laptop is an Acer Aspire 7500 series).
Purchased a new keyboard and that fixed only the keyboard, leaving the 2 USB's still not working.
After some research of my USB problem I decided to follow instructions from my girlfriend. So, I went into device manager with the intention of uninstalling and re-installing the two USB drivers giving me the trouble but they had already been removed. When I tried to re-install them the install wizard said that it couldn't locate the driver for those two USB'S.
I started to research some more and came across one article that said my faulty USB's were due to a recent AMD graphics card update. This made sense to me because I remember when I first turned my laptop on there was an AMD graphics update that was ready to be installed and so I did it the very first day. When I came across that AMD article I was already in device manager looking for a different USB drivers to fit the spot of the 2 that weren't working. I found a driver (either composite or generic, can't remember) that I was going to put in the place of both the other ones, so I did and restarted my laptop.
As you probably guessed, the drivers didn't work as I planned and I was still without my two USB ports, and now the laptop was experiencing start up issuea and i wasn't very happy. Then I thought about doing a system restore, going back in time about 10 weeks or more, back to when everything was going just fine, I also thought about starting windows up in like safe mode but then I said "I can do a last good configuration and everything will work!" But i found out that" last good confuguration" no longer existed. Plus, my brain kept processing the system recovery option and whether I was going to keep my files or just start everything from scratch was all running through my brain. However, no matter which recovery choice I went with it came back with the repair was unsuccessful or the system could not restore your computer back to (this time) or start up repair could not fix the issue, etc. Then I attempted to do the recovery through command prompt and that's when I learned that my hard drive was write protected. Now I dont know how it got in that state but I know it wasn't me because I dont know how to do it or why it is done. This then triggered me to remember that there was a time when this had first happened and I went into the bios to see if there could of been a setting in there (I know thinking that was dumb lol) but there wasn't. I did see that the hard drive was locked with an hdd password on it, something else I did not do....
Now I don't have an endless amount of patience and about this time they were about as thin as they were going to get. Everything I was trying to get my computer back up and working was failing all because the hard-drive miraculously became write protected so I was going to try to unwrite protect it. That's when I went back into command prompt and also noticed that there were three partitions and one of them were hidden.
This part of the whole thing is totally my fault because I know what partitions are for but I didn't know enough about them to not consider tampering with them so I researched why a partition would be hidden why there were three partitions on my hard drive and if I should remove one. Evidently there was an article that said it would be okay to take one away and so I did screwing myself totally because the computer wouldn't boot after that.
So yesterday, then all evening and into the wee morning, I hooked up my laptop hard drive as an external drive and tried to use the minitool pro partition recovery wizard. I was trying to recover that one partition but believe it or not that tool was too complicated for me to figure out. Then I downloaded EaseUS partition recovery, followed the instructions, and EaseUS found the deleted partition the very first go around. I then proceed to recover it and right at the very end the program says "CONGRATULATIONS, your partition has been recovered successfully!" Followed with Lost Boot which I am assuming means my boot folder or partition is lost so I still cannot start up my laptop.

So after that entire story my question is, what do I do now? How do I get back or create the boot that was lost while recovering the partition? What exactly is that partition even worth if the boot was lost in the process.

I know my lack of patience made.me hasty so I deleted something I really shouldn't of been dabbling in. This is my school laptop as I am in my last year at the University of Phoenix online currently earning my bachelor's in IT with a certificate in advanced cyber security. I have practically four years of info I would rather not have to forfeit due to my own stupidity and so is their any way to help me out with getting that lost boot back?

 

If you can hook up the HDD as an external drive, you should at least be able to copy your documents and files to another external drive or USB. That would be my first priority before trying to sort out the mess - recover your files...

 

Hey,

Yes the best idea would to to try and back up the files from all the partitions where you did store any important ones, if the files are protected from copying I would suggest to try and hook it up to an apple computer because most of the times it gets rid of these "restrictions" but not always, also as towards your recovery process of your files I would be really careful not to copy any files that you are not familiar with because it might be the cause of the lock (could be anything from a virus to a dedicated batch file etc etc, or just a simple encryption) so yea try and recover the files and after that you can do a full format of the drive if you have your CD key for the previously installed Operating System (only needed if you did not log in via Microsoft), after that its just simply a format of the hidden and the locked partition.(I only advise to have your Key ready because it might be required to reinstall windows if you cannot format the drive partition that is locked).
TL;DR
- Basically Copy all the files that are important
- A full drive format might be required
- Hidden partitions are mostly system reserved partitions but we will see about that
- For a partition to become locked you might have installed a manager tool of somesort that encrypts the drive
- Formatting the partitions that are password protected will remove all the data on that partition so pay attention to all the files that are important to you.

 

Digital licenses for Windows 10 are stored and retrieved by the unique hardware ID of the computer to/from Microsoft Activation Servers and logging in with a Microsoft Account has nothing to do with that. The Microsoft Account is only required if you want to move that stored digital license to a different computer.

 

Well I cannot know everything *Smile, but as far as I tought if you log in with a microsoft account it dedicates the key to your account, and some people choose not to activate windows when first installing but thank you for the information.

 

Yup... even tho' sometimes you have to make them think you are following their instructions... either way, it's always a good thing *Wink

You mean chipset drivers? as opposed to dedicated GPU drivers specifically?

It's a bit bizarre that the disk became write-protected TBH...

Restore points is a hit-'n-miss affair - I never use it - Macrium back-ups are the way to go - it will backup your boot loader as well - with a choice to restore it if required.

Otherwise I am in agreement with the advice regarding copying as much data as possible from the wonky HDD and doing a clean install on a formatted partition. No need for a key of the same edition.

 

OK so I believe I have all the files I am wanting. So now I need to format the drive, but remember, I cannot put the hard drive in the Acer because it is not booting up. That means I need to format it and re install Windows while it is hooked up as an external correct? This is the confusing part to me because my brother formatted his hard drive and then when he tried to reinstall with both a windows credit and a USB it told him their was no operating system on the drive so he never did get that hard drive up and running with any OS .

 

Does it need to be GPT partitioned for UEFI or MBR partitioned for legacy BIOS?

You want to install Windows 10 onto this hard drive while it is connected as a USB drive to one computer and then install that hard drive internally into another computer?

 

I believe I seen the boot files while searching for the ones o needed to keep that said MBR....however the hard drive had windows 7 on it when I bought it from someone I worked with and at one time I am thinking they had windows 8.1 installed because when I got the windows 10 free update the computer started to offer me a choice of booting from the Windows 10 OS or Windows 8.1 OS....what is the possibility that there are 3 boot files because of the 3 different OS installed on it. (If windows 8.1 was indeed installed)?