Splitting/Merging Partitions

SIKKaudio · 23 Jul 2015

Hey I recently reinstalled Windows 7 Home Premium x64 from scratch and I was being stupid and set my c: drive to only 26gb of space and I quickly ran out of space since every program auto stores everything in the "User" or "Program Files x86" files.

I have a E: drive set with 570gb of space which will be nice for anything that isn't automatically stored in the C:.

But I would like to move like 200gb to the C: drive if possible.

I'm in the Disk Management trying to merge the partitions by Shrinking E: by 200gb which creates 197.31GB of unallocated space.

When I try to "Extend Volume" in C: I am not able to click Extend Volume. So now I am stumped.

There is also no "Merge" option.

Thanks in advance

essenbe · 23 Jul 2015

Hello, SIKKaudio and welcome to the forums. Your problem is that in Disk Management you can only extend a partition to the right and the space must be next to each other. What you want to do can be done with Partition Wizard (free). See option 3 in this tutorial Partition Wizard : Use the Bootable CD. I think that will help you.

Another thing you may want to consider is moving your user files to the Data partition. That will help out a lot on space needed. By doing that I have never needed 100 GB on my OS partition. I currently have quite a few programs installed and use a 119 GB SSD and have over 60 GB free. User Folders - Change Default Location The only way that will affect you is if you use Windows Imaging to image your OS drive. It will want to include your Data Partition. Macrium (free) is probably the imaging software most popular here. Imaging with free Macrium

GokAy · 24 Jul 2015

I had to do a very similar thing in a Virtual Windows 10 yesterday, there was a 350MB hidden partition in the way between free space and C. I used Partition Wizard free (as Steve suggested).

- Move the "System Reserved" partition to the left, between E and unallocated
- Resize C to the left unallocated space
is all you need to do. PW free is a good product that is mostly successful, however if anything go wrong you may lose your data, so I strongly advise you image backup to an external with Macrium free.