Extending volume

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You won't be able to resize the C primary while booted in the OS installed on it. For this you would need to boot live from a 3rd party drive tool program's own live cd to effectively remove the second partition and expand the present C primary into that space.

The first thing to do since you are planning to use removable media would be backing up anything important first before any partition changes are made in case the partition table is damaged. That would trash the entire C primary resulting in the need to restart fresh with everything if unable to be repaired.

The resize option seen in the drive tools included with the 7 recovery dvd wouldn't be advised for this while other free drive programs are available. Partition Wizard is one more popular here. Free Download Magic Partition Manager Software – Partition Wizard Online

The free Linux drive tool GParted or Gnome Partition Editor is another drive program you use while booted live from cd or even usb flash drive in order to repartition drives. That requires a program that can burn iso disk images onto cd or a program like the shareware download of UltraISO to see written to a flash drive made bootable.

If you have a live repair cd which is one option available in 7 for creating a cd containing the repair tools found on the 7 upgrade or full version disks you could also see the C primary extended using the DiskPart tool. You would still have to be booted live however as far as the main partition is concerned.

First you have to take into account the hidden recovery partition the laptop has if 7 came preinstalled and get to know how the drive is layed out. Once booted live you then go to the command prompt option and type diskpart at the dos type prompt followed by the use of the "list volume" command.

Each partition will be labeled as Volume 0, Volume 1, and Volume 2 depending on where the recovery partition is found at the start or rear of the drive. On some laptops that may be seen at the back end about 7gb or larger in size. On others that will proceed the main C primary.

So assuming C is Volume 2 you would then type "select volume 2" and press enter for that command. The confirmation when the command is entered correctly will then be displayed in the command prompt window.

The next and last step before typing exit or clicking on the corner to close out the command prompt is simply typing "extend" and pressing enter to watch for "DiskPart successfully extended the volume". That will automatically see the C primary fill in the unallocated drive space left behind when removing the secondary backup partition you were using.

Simply type "exit" to close up the window and restart the laptop to see if all goes well. With favorable results the main C primary is now seen using the full capacity less recovery partition(7-10+gb on average).

Need the Disk Mgmt screenshot. If both partitions are Primary then use free Partition Wizard bootable CD linked above.

Rightclick partition to Delete, OK.

Then rightclick adjacent partition to Resize over deleted space, OK. Apply all steps.

If any of these partitions sit on boot sector, Win7 might not now start. Make sure it is marked Active with PW, then boot Win7 DVD Repair console or Repair CD, click through to Recovery Tools list to run Startup Repair up to 3 separate times with reboots to repair MBR until Win7 starts.

Backup a System Image and your files externally as 3rd party software Resizing operations can fail, although we haven't had one fail with PW CD in hundreds we've helped with here.

You won't have to worry about marking anything active when simply expanding the C primary out to fill the drive space in since that is already an active primary.

If you were adding a new partition instead of removing one once the new volume wizard is followed and a drive letter is assigned for a new volume the new partition is then made active when Windows mounts it as a new logical drive. Another hard drive being added on would be initialized at that time and be seen as online.

The main concern would be making sure to back up anything important from the drive before proceeding with either method or program just in case something fails like the partition table getting corrupted in the process.

If you were working with an external the advice on creating a system image of the entire drive would be a thought just in case of any mishap when going to resize was seen you would simply restore the image. karlsnooks posted a few links for some free home versions earlier as well as the builtin image tool available in 7.