Deleted Hard Drive Partition

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Astreocclu

Deleted Hard Drive Partition

Post by Astreocclu »

Hello All,

I have two laptops at the moment, one is an old HP with busted hardware and one is a 2017 Dell that is fine in that regard. The HP runs linux mint Cinammon 18.3 and the Dell ran windows 10 64 bit pro. I say ran because I was trying to turn the Dell into a dual boot system. I also have 1 external harddrive (currently has ps4 games but I could format it) and a 32 gigabyte USB stick.

I deleted the Microsoft reserved partition from a Linux live boot USB using Gparted. Since it serves little to no actual purpose I thought it would be fine deleting it. The issue is now there is 14 Megabytes of unallocated data between the EFI boot loader (first partition) and the actual OS. I think this is what is causing it to not boot. Unfortunately I cannot seem to move anything around without potentially losing everything? And it seems as there is no easy way for the windows OS partition to "absorb" the 14 megabytes of data.

The two options I was looking at was creating a Windows USB recovery key but after a ton of googling I am not sure how to go about doing that (when I mount either the generic Windows 10 ISO or the one that is meant for my dell laptop they both show up with just a "." folder and a readme.text both with nothing in it). The second was to just somehow get rid of that unallocated data and see if that is the issue.

Sorry if this is basic stuff but I went through days of work to originally get these two computers running at all and now I just don't want to mess something up again. Thank you in advance for any help.
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Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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