Win7 - extending partition into an defunct partition previously used for win8

[jjohnsoncantell]

Hi Everyone,

 

I recently dual booted win7+win8 as an experiment and decided to remove windows 8 as i never used it. Problem started during windows 7 setup at the disk management screen, i deleted both my win7+win8 partitions and the other system partition win7 creates, however it would not show the free space as one entity, it insted showed them as two. Even after a refresh i still couldnt use them as one.

 

After a clean win7 install, disk management still shows that ex-win8 partition as unpartitioned space. For some reason i cannot expand my win7 partition into it yet my data storage partition will.

 

Any idea where im going wrong?

James