How can I merge drives C & D

mamazaac

I have an Acer desktop pc which has the hard drive partitioned into C and D drives. From what I understand the purpose of the D drive is mainly to use it to back up the C drive, however I now have an external hard drive which I am using for this. As my C drive is almost full, I would like to remove the partition/merge the drives to give me more space on my C drive. Please can someone give me some advice as to how to do this.

Many thanks in advance for any help.

mamazaac

Thank you for your reply. I am running xp but don't have the cd. Probably just as well to use the d drive separately as you say, but in case I change my mind is gparted/partition magic free to download and easy to use please?

mitchg

If you do a google search you will fin a version of partition magic, i have uesd this program before and its easy enough to use.

exup

you may be able to use the XP disk manager to delete the partition.

Go to>
Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools
From there click on Computer Management and then on the list on the left you should see "Disk Management" click this and it should show you a summary of all drives harddrive and CD/DVD etc.

right click on the partition you want to remove and it should give yu the option to delete it. I would recommend saving any files to a seperate drive before you do this though.

dcag36

mamazaac wrote: »

I have an Acer desktop pc which has the hard drive partitioned into C and D drives. From what I understand the purpose of the D drive is mainly to use it to back up the C drive, however I now have an external hard drive which I am using for this. As my C drive is almost full, I would like to remove the partition/merge the drives to give me more space on my C drive. Please can someone give me some advice as to how to do this.

Many thanks in advance for any help.

be careful like said before there will be a restore partition on there once this is deleted you wont be able to restore the pc

mamazaac

loaner wrote: »

you cant merge partitions in xp without 3rd party software.

gparted is free, partition magic isn't

but before you do anything, I suggest you do a full image backup (and create an xp cd - one day you will need it).

This allows you to backup to cd/dvd, and includes windows as well as data

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp

Thank you for your reply - I do a full back up image regularly onto external hard drive anyway, but don't have an xp cd. Please would you (or any other kind person out there) advise me on how to create an xp cd?

mamazaac

exup wrote: »

you may be able to use the XP disk manager to delete the partition.

Go to>
Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools
From there click on Computer Management and then on the list on the left you should see "Disk Management" click this and it should show you a summary of all drives harddrive and CD/DVD etc.

right click on the partition you want to remove and it should give yu the option to delete it. I would recommend saving any files to a seperate drive before you do this though.

Thank you, yes the option to delete it is there although I haven't clicked on it yet. Will this move the space automatically to C drive? Just want to check I won't lose the space altogether.

mamazaac

dcag36 wrote: »

be careful like said before there will be a restore partition on there once this is deleted you wont be able to restore the pc

Sorry, don't remember you saying before that I wouldn't be able to restore the pc! I back up everything to an external hard drive (using Nero), so are you saying that this would be useless if I remove the D drive as I wouldn't be able to restore the pc anyway? Or is the PQSERVICE partition shown in computer management my restore partition and you are saying I should be careful not to delete that one?

tradetime

The restore partition on computers that have them is usually hidden to the user and the OS, however partitioning tools will see it. I'd imagine as long as you don't touch it, should be ok. If you have imaging software, are you not able to image the recovery partition as well just in case, you could restore that after if all went badly.

Exo

Hi, if the computer was supplied with two partitions on one hard drive, then as mentioned above, it is probable that the D partition is your recovery/restore partition.
As you do not have an XP disc, that just about confirms that suspicion.

Assuming your case has sufficient room and the motherboard has sufficient channels, would it not be easier just to install another internal hard drive of the correct capacity or transfer further data to your external drive?

mdbarber

my mrs has an acer lappy and it actually has 3 partitions on it but one is not alloted a drive letter, problem here is that any work on the second partition may affect access to the 3rd.
There is usually a utility to burn system restore disks look in the acer software entries in the programs menu and do this first.
As an alternative thought the acers d: partition is marked "Data" but the my docs folder is not re-located ther, this may free up a lot of space on c:
Right click on my docs icon on desktop and change the location to "D:\My Documents" then click the move button, see how much space it frees up