Hi, I got an old laptop and am going to give it to my son for Christmas.
When I booted it up I noticed the disk partitions were strange - there were many of them and almost no space in the OS (C:) partition. What should I do to get them in a more "normal" state?
I get nervous about messing with partitions so I wanted to ask here before doing anything.
Many Thanks!
Someone put the page file on that 5.59 GB Extended partition, useless.
Delete it and the page file will go back on C and it will become un allocated space.
You can then add all of the un allocated space to C
You can do this right there through Disk Management.
A Partition Wizard Boot CD is also a very safe and reliable tool to work with partitions, I highly recommend it
Bootable Partition Manger | MiniTool Partition Wizard Bootable Edition
You may need to turn off the paging file long enough to delete D in order to Extend C. Change Virtual Memory Paging File
Note that since it's a Logical partition you'll need to delete it twice in Disk Mgmt, once for the volume and once for the partition. Partition or Volume - Delete
Then you'll just click through all the defaults provided to extend C across, unless you want to save some space for a storage or data drive: Partition or Volume - Extend
If you want to extend only part way over in order to have a data or storage partition, then once you do that you can create the partition as shown here: Partition or Volume - Create New
Thanks! I was able to get more space on the C: drive. But I can't extend C: to use the huge amount of unallocated space I have. The option to extend C: is greyed out. Any ideas?
Why did you shrink the Recovery partition? Nothing was said about doing that. It must have all the available space originally issued on it to boot and run Recovery if you'd ever want to do that.
But running Recovery restores to Factory Condition which is a grossly inferior install. If you still have the Factory install you should strongly consider finally enjoying native Win7 performance by doing a Clean Reinstall Windows 7, deleting all partitions during the process to get it cleanest.
If you want to keep the Recovery partition then rightclick on it in Disk Mgmt to Extend it back to its correct size.
If you want to delete the Recovery partition then first you'll need to move the Bootmgr - Move to C:\ with EasyBCD - Windows 7 Forums until Win7 starts with the System Active flags on C. You can then delete Recovery using Partition Wizard bootable CD and resize C to the left as shown in this video for Partition Wizard Resize Partition - Video Help.
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