HDD/SSD Disk Management Issues After Windows 8 Reinstallation

[treregaurd]

Edit: I attempted the 'restore' function in windows and the process would get stuck at a low %-completion. I then deleted all my drive info and started over. I got rid of the D drive (from the picture), but the recovery and system partitions remain. I'm going to leave them partitioned. If this is incorrect, please let me know. Thanks for looking.

I recently reinstalled windows 8 to my SSD. During the installation, I accidentally deleted my HDD system partition.

This is my current situation after attempting to repair, recover, and fix my system through the windows boot disk:

The D drive used to be a system partition. How do I get it back to default?

The two smaller partitions on Disk 1 are new. How do I get rid of them safely?

I tried restoring my PC to manufacturer defaults when I deleted the system partition, but that didn't work because I was missing 'key partitions.' I could run it now that I have windows installed, but I have reservations because the partitions are all mixed up. Another thread says that deleting system partitions is alright, but the option is not available in Disk Management.

 

[CaedenV]

Oh boy, your computer is quite confused.

Before I give you advice, could I get a little information?
1) what are we looking at? Desktop, laptop? Is this a black box (dell, hp, etc.) or a white box (home built?). What are the basic specs? (mobo, cpu, ram, gpu)
2) Is the little drive an SSD or HDD? Are both drives original, or did you add a drive?
3) Which drive do you want as your main system drive? I would suggest using the 120GB drive as primary and then the 2TB drive as bulk storage. Right now things are confused
4) What is the eventual goal here? Are you trying to reset things to default? Are you trying to upgrade to win8?


My best guess (and please correct me if I am wrong here) is that this is some sort of black box, which you have added a 2TB drive to. In the process you accidentally hooked up your new drive to the primary master SATA connector (SATA0), and the old drive to the primary slave (SATA1). Then you attempted a restore, where the BIOS looks for a hidden partition (the 300MB Recovery Partition which has no drive letter) on the SATA0 port, but because the drive was moved it got confused and gave up. Simply switching your SATA cables could very well fix your issue here if all you are looking to do is a simple restore... granted 300MB is ~20GB short of a system image so hopefully everything is still there somewhere.

Now you also have a D: of 350MB. This is from your attempted win8 install. When you install windows 8 it takes a little 350MB chunk of the HDD to do with as it pleases (Win Vista and 7 also do this, but with a much smaller 100MB). This typically does not have a drive letter, so I am assuming that you assigned it a letter yourself in an attempt to figure out what it was. The issue here is that this little partition always goes on the primary master drive even if that drive is not the system drive... but if you were to ever remove that drive then your system becomes useless even though there is technically nothing wrong with your system drive because that little partition tells the system where important stuff is hiding.

Anywho. First get back to me about the questions I asked. After that then unplug your big 2TB drive (and keep it unplugged until you are done formatting/installing your system), and move your system drive to the SATA0 connector. Then we can properly troubbleshoot exactly what is going on here.

 

[treregaurd]

So I couldn't play GW2 at full settings and have gotten advice that directed me to reinstall windows. If I'm going to do that, I may as well finally deal with this issue that I have been trying to forget about.

This is a custom build.

Motherboard: ASUS Z87-A.
CPU: i5-4670k
RAM: 8gb
GPU: GTX 770

The little drive is my SSD.

I'd like to make the SSD my OS drive after deleting everything on the computer and recreating a working system partition to my HDD.
My system partition has 100% free space after being used for 2 months.

I wanted to perform a clean installation of Windows 8. I deleted my main partition on my HDD as well as the one on my SSD. I saw that the system partition on my HDD still had space being used, so I deleted it. When I installed Windows 8 to my SSD, the system partition was put onto my SSD.

I have never performed any installation on the inside of a computer, so I'd like to see if the info I've provided alters your instructions.

I also have the option to restore my computer to it's default state.