Oh, and by the way, now that the primary partition is all the way "left" I am free (in the Disk Management snap-in for Computer Management) to "Extend Volume" onto the unallocated portion of the virtual disk.
Here's what the disk looks like now.
So in summary, here are the steps I used to put my bastard drive right...
- In Disk Management, delete all the unneeded partitions, leaving only the primary partition (on the right) and the unallocated space (on the left).
- After shutting down the VM, download the GParted ISO image and mount it to the VM also setting it as the startup disk then restart the VM.
- In GParted, move the primary partition all the way to the left, also expanding it slightly. This took about 3 hours in my case.
- After shutting down the VM, mount the Windows Repair Disk image to the VM and set it as the startup disk then restart the VM.
- Repair the installation then restart.
One note: The HowToGeek article suggests that Windows will rename the installation to ...(Repaired) but that did not happen in my case. Nor did windows ask me to choose which installation to run, neither did it run scandisk at startup.
-Brian