Merging Partitions Help Please

Kaktussoft said:

TDKMate said:

Kaktussoft said:

K is empty, so there's nothing to merge!

Just delete K and afterwards extend D to left side using Partition Wizard for example.

Or do I totally misunderstood the question(?)

You understand correctly. But to my understanding, Partition Wizard Free won't do that, I'd need the $40 Pro version, which I'd like to avoid.

PW can do it!

TVeblen said:

Agreed^
The free version of Partition Wizard will extend a partition to the left.

Yes, it does. I downloaded and installed it, and as mentioned above, the free version does not merge. So I tried to extend the two partitions together. The only problem is that, in my case, it leaves almost a 41GB gap. And I didn't really want to have a drive letter assigned to such a small partition.

So I tried EaseUS. See below post for more on that.
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Short version: I’m up and running; project complete. I do appreciate all the help. And I learned a lot in the process.

Observations and conclusions:

At first I was going to go with Disk Management as that seemed the easiest. But feeling adventurous I tried Partition Magic Free. As mentioned above, it left a ‘hanging chad,’ LOL.

So I tried EaseUS Partition Manager. The first thing I didn’t like about it was it wanted to install other software. If I wasn’t paying attention, it would have but I managed to block it. Once up and running, it didn’t have the same look-n-feel of Partition Magic, meaning PW had a nicer interface. That doesn’t really matter if a program works, of course.

Its Merge feature was not greyed out so I gave it a try. Even though it worked, I would not use it again for my particular situation. The reason is simple: the merge was ridiculous slow to be polite.

Never merging before I didn’t really know what to expect, but I figured a merge would be more along the lines of simply using the info in the existing file allocation table (or whatever is the correct term) and then, if wanted, you could defrag later.

So I figured the process would be a lot faster than either a simple file copy/recopy or backup and restore. Maybe even taking just a few minutes.

Wrong. The process took a whopping 9 hours!!! To me that is unbelievable. If I would have used Disk Management to delete both partitions then make one out of them, it would have taken right around 2 hours to restore from my backup.

That’s a 7 hour difference!

And on top of that, the computer was unusable for 9 hours. It was actually a little scary, too, in that reading EaseUS's tutorial on merging it basically said to click the on the two partitions to merge and:

“Click Apply, you have successfully merged the partition F into partition D.”

That also gave the impression it was a pretty quick process. It does Not mention that when you do so, you computer reboots into the program's DOS like environment to do its 9 hours worth of work. For a brief moment I thought my computer got hosed up.

There was no option to abort.

The program also starts when you boot into Windows, which I don’t like and feel is unnecessary. I uninstalled the program.

So in conclusion for others in a similar situation: restoring from a backup could save you a ton of time. I do not have any idea if Partition Magic Pro’s merge is any faster. Hopefully so.

This is a heads-up for anyone who may be needing a similar fix. Searching for some data files on my merged 'D' drive, I noticed that *all* 99,941 files on that drive have the same Created On/Modified date, which is the date of my merge.

The merge program did not bother keep the original dates...

This is a major problem for me as most of my searches are by dates!

This is a very big headache, to put it mildly...
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TVeblen said:

Sorry to say, but we did recommend the data transfer and extend partition method, not a merge. Can't say we anticipated this particular problem, but sometimes the simplest way is the best way, from wisdom handed down over the years.

You're absolutely right; it would have been much better that way. And that's one reason why I, embarrassingly, am sharing my unpleasant experiences, to help others avoid the same pitfalls.

At least I learned some very valuable lessons.

Layback Bear said:

Thank you for sharing.
That information will be quite helpful to others.
Let us know how you work out this date problem you now have.
That information would also help others.

Here you go:

With a lot of help from my backup program's forum, I learned how to restore my image backup of the drive to a new, as in different location. But first I had to backup the files/folders that had changed. The backup program didn't have an option to backup up just files by date so what I did was use a good old fashioned Windows Explorer search on files added/changed after the merge date.

Since there weren't too many, I did another old fashioned thing and just copied them to an external drive. I then Ctrl-Ced the file locations for easy restore, saving them in a .txt file.

Next I did the image restore to the newly expanded 'D' Drive as mentioned above.

I then rebuilt the new folders using a CMD box and the MD command, pasting the file locations I copied earlier.

I followed that up with copying the new files back to the newly created folder locations.

So all is good now!

TVeblen said:

Do you have a backup of your data? The backup will have retained the dates.

That's what I wound up doing; see above. I wasn't sure if it saved the correct dates, so it was a little tense for me. But it did so I'm happy.

I estimated in a post above that the image restore would take about two hours. I wasn't too far off: it took 1 hour, 44 minutes.

I want to thank everyone for their help, comments, and guidance! I is appreciated!!