Primary Partition and Free Space Questions

[thenoo]

I have 2 SATA drives installed on my desktop i.e. h/d 0 & h/d 1

I had the second h/d Partitioned into several Partitions but have now deleted all of these leaving only one Partition with the rest of the drive being designated "Free Space" This is coloured green in Disk Management. The remaining Partition is a Primary Partition coloured dark blue in D.M. The Primary Partition is formatted in NTFS and contains data.

I now want to have this h/d created into a single un-partitioned drive without loosing the data stored at the moment on its Partition.

How do I go about this ?

Is the "Free Space" here still formatted in NTFS as it was before I deleted the partitions contained there ?

 

[theog]

Can you post a screen shot Disk management?
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[Bare Foot Kid]

Hello mate.



If this is what you have just right click it and delete it to make it unallocated space that can then be added to the other partition.

Partition or Volume - Extend

click to enlarge


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[thenoo]

Can you post a screen shot Disk management?

Sure , here is the D.M. screen shot .

In this you'll see similar operations I have done on the h/d 0.
However , as this h/d also contains a dual boot setup between XP and WIN 7 , I deliberately was not going to mention that drive in the interests of simplicity - I intend to remove the XP eventually .
The Dual Boot setup was done using software called "BING NT" from terabyteunlimited.com and is not really relevant to what I'm attempting here.

Basically , I'm in the process of removing excess Partitons while , at the same time preserving data which existed on them before I deleted them and , if I can restrict my comments to what I'm trying to do to the h/d 1 situation , I think it will make any replies simpler to answer.

On this second h/d you'll see the Primary Partition J together with the "Free Space" This was where I had several Partitions before deleting them. I have left J untouched , so far , as it contains data.

What I would like to do now is change this h/d into undivided space formatted in NTFS without loosing the data in J.

Hence my question as to whether it will be possible to combine Partition J with the "Free Space" on this h/d so that I end up with a h/d undivided , formatted in NTFS with its present data preserved.

Hopefully this rather long-winded explanation has not muddied the waters too much !

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

Hello mate.



If this is what you have just right click it and delete it to make it unallocated space that can then be added to the other partition.

Partition or Volume - Extend

click to enlarge
View attachment 130864

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Yes do as I suggest in my post #3 above and delete the "free space" and use the tutorial to extend J: into the unallocated space created by the deleted free space; the data on J: will be safe and be sure to post back with any further questions you may have and to keep us informed.

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

You can also use the free bootable Partition Wizard CD to recover the 14.65GB unallocated space to the left of the C: partition on the Disk 0 into the C: partition if you choose to do so; have a look at this tutorial at the link below for some ideas on how to go about it; it is a very safe, reliable program to use.

Partition Wizard : Use the Bootable CD



Then you can delete the free space to the right of C: on Disk 0 to make unallocated space that can then be recovered into C: using the same Windows disk management method posted earlier.