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disk management

I formerly had a linux partition, but I deleted it and now I have 107 GB left over which I would like to feed back into C:

Is that possible? I'm not sure what the 2GB and 350MB partitions are for. I tried EASUS Partition manager, but it didn't let me select both C: and D: to merge.

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3 Answers 3

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You can simply delete the empty partition, and expand C: to fill the gap.

  • (I would recommend backing up the system before doing anything with partitions.)

  • Right click on the empty partition, and hit delete.

  • You may be able to hit extend on C:, but this may not work.

  • If (2) doesn't work, you're best bet is to use a 3rd party tool. AOMEI Partition Assistant is a very widely used one, and was designed for this purpose.

A lot of OEMs (industry slang for the people who made the computer) give you 3 or 4 partitions when you buy the computer. You often cannot delete these with the default partitioner (hence the error). If you need to use the default partitioner, maybe try to shrink the empty one so it uses less space, and then you should be able to extend C: into the empty space. You may not be able to get rid of the empty partition altogether though.

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ACarter, it is telling me "There is not enough space available on the disk(s) to complete this operation" when I try to delete the partition. –  Blub Nov 4 '12 at 21:47
@Blub Not enough space? Is you're system crazily full? (Sometimes when something's so full, there's not enough room to delete something) If there's a fair amount of space left, I'm not sure why that would happen. –  ACarter Nov 4 '12 at 21:49
I had around 800MB of free space left. But I tried your program now, and it worked immediately! Not sure why all this software is so extremely different, the EASUS thing didn't even offer to merge them. –  Blub Nov 4 '12 at 21:52
Xandy, I guess I got lucky then. It seems like everything worked out for me. –  Blub Nov 6 '12 at 12:52
Lucky or not, it's not usual to have what I did in the merging tests, so their merge operation may generally work. But still allowing users to do unsafe operations without a proper warning is not recommended. In any case, remember to have only 1 extended partition and no primary partitions to be safe. After a merge I'd recommend running chkdsk /F L: where L is the letter of the resulting drive. –  Xandy Nov 6 '12 at 18:59

One problem you've for is that C: and D: are not contiguous (next to each other). The only way to merge them would be to delete both D: and the 2GB partition (you should firstly find out ig there is anything there - it might have been a swap partition from your linux install), then you'd need to expand C: to fill the remaining space.

Another problem is that D: appears to be a logical drive on an extended partition. Generally systems can have a maximum of four partitions. To get around this, someone, somewhere decided to make one of these partitions an 'extended partition' which could host any number of partitions within. This is what seems to be happening on D:. Not a problem in itself, but you'd need to delete the logical drive first, then the extended partition.

If the Windows disk manager doesn't work, you could also try booting into a linux liveCD/liveUSB and using the partition manager (gparted) in that.

And if all else fails there might be some LVM-type solution (I think you need to convert the volume type in Windows somewhere) to logically combine the two partitions into one (as opposed to actually combining them into one)

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  1. Back up your important files (in case that the partition edition fails).
  2. If the partition that you want to extend is FAT32, defragment it.
  3. If you have a Linux live cd with GParted in it (like Ubuntu) use it, if not there is an specific GParted live cd http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php
  4. In (live booted) GParted join both partitions. You can do things like deleting a partition, moving it and resizing it with a nice GUI.
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