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I am using a dual boot Ubuntu/win7 machine. My win 7recovery partition is around 20GB, since I have created recovery disks I am assuming I no longer need it my windows partition is only small I was thinking to delete the recovery and add an extra 20GB to my Win. Is my thinking sensible there?. The recovery partition shows as the 1st partition on my hard disc. I'm a bit concerned that by moving the starting position of my Win partition to the start of the hard disc I will make win 7 'lost' and unable to boot. I am fairly new to ubuntu and haven't used a dual boot machine before. I know I use GRUB 2 to boot either windows or ubuntu but I can't remember if I 'loose' the win7 partition and use the recovery disks wether MBR will then overwrite grub. I'm basically concerned it could become very messy and just looking for some advice as the best way to go about it. Any ideas, in n00b language?

Si Peertrowski
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2 Answers2

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I removed the Recovery Partition from my Dual Boot laptop, but I haven't tried to use the recovery disks yet, so I don't know what they do in terms of MBR and existing partitions. However I can say that deleting the partition hasn't affected my Windows or Ubuntu install.

I recommend using a tool like http://redobackup.org/

to make a full, "bare-metal" backup of your disks partitions. Then you shouldn't have to mess with Windows recovery disks. You can also use Redo to run Gparted and delete/resize partitions.

Colin Matheson
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The ability to boot up an OS depends on the bootloader knowing the start position on the disk on the partition, so moving your Windows partition (or any other with an OS on it) will require you to repair your bootloader.

You'll need to repair both the Windows bootloader and Grub. You may see an entry for Window s in your Grub menu, but it's simply forwarding to the Windows loader. The act of repairing the Windows loader will however overwrite Grub so you'll need to repair that afterwards.

Before trying any of this, there is one important thing you must do:

Backup your data

Messing about with bootloaders isn't the worst thing you can do to your computer, but if anything goes wrong it can sometimes be difficult to get back to your files, so don't take any chances.

  1. Repair your Windows bootloader, using the installation disk and following this guide.
  2. Repair Grub following this guide.

Hope that helps.