Combine Unallocated space to System Partition

AthanasianCreed said:

... So...you are confident i can increase # 2 ESP by 601 mb unallocated space behind it & # 5 (NTFS) by 452 mb in front of it without hosing my system??

Yes, i do have a backup of my system just in case.

TIA,

Ray

Hi, Ray.

Sorry for delaying response - I'm interpreting your question of confidence as directed at me only because I was the one saying you can do it. Considering how I progressed in my earlier posts I must be honest and say that, no, I'm not near as confident in this path as I was in the beginning. I hope you'll indulge me using your question (and then me trying something similar - but in reverse) as a learning experience for myself.

For most of yesterday, I've been using Macrium to capture images of my disk (after an initial image of where I started from) each step of the way in this sequence: Restore my laptop to out-of-the box (OOTB) condition as it came from Dell with WIn8.1 and OEM partitions, upgrade (from iso) to Win10 build 10240 (leaving all partitions alone), go back to OOTB and upgrade to build 10586 (leaving all partitions alone).

The upgrade scenarios yielded a 7 partition layout as follows: 500 MB ESP, 40 MB OEM Diagnostics, 128 MB MSR, 750 MB (old) WinRE, 456 GB OS partition, 450 MB (new) WinRE, 7.62 GB OEM (Dell) Factory Restore Partition.

Even though Partitions 6 and 7 give me fully functional Win RE tools AND a Dell Factory Restore partition still useable to get to OOTB state (but WIn8.1), It's quite a clutter and unnecesarry for me.

I will be sticking with my simple current 4 partition layout that the subsequent Win10 clean install gave me.

Frankly, I believe you may be best served by the solution topgundcp gave you in the last paragraph of his post above.

Thanks for bearing with me while I meandered around in your thread.

Any particular reason you hesitate to use the method topgun points out? Although it involves a clean install, you will have all data AND programs (without having to reinstall them) restored and intact at the end.

Fair enough - appreciate your honesty and I wouldn't criticize your logic!

My value judgment of it differs a little bit in that it just seems topgun's method is the lowest risk path (as far as not borking anything) and seems fairly straightforward and seamless - although I understand if it seems like too much bother to you.

Since I tried to do the kind of operations that I thought would directly address your initial inquiry, but then hit unanticipated complications, I'm inclined to view my initial suggestion now as riskier and potentially MORE work than topgun's suggestion to end up with a proper GPT disk partitioning scheme.