Help needing extending a HD partition

[Riley Blue]

My PC's C drive is showing 1.43 GB free of 223 GB but I have an E drive with 921 GB free of 931GB, there is nothing showing on it at all. It's showing as Disk 0 in Disk Management, the C Drive is Disk 1.

Can I extend or merge the two? If so, can someone talk me through it please? OS is Windows 10.

[Mr Pointy]

What about Drive D? Stick a screen shot of the Disk Management window up so we can see what is going on.

[Riley Blue]

Any help?

[Jinx]

Haven't tried the advice on this link https://www.resize-c.com/howto/merge-two-drives-wi... but do back up any data before trying.

[Vsix and Vtec]

You'd be better off doing a full backup of C, reinstalling Windows on disc 0 and then doing a system restore from your full backup. Presumably you only have Windows on C, and all downloads and document files are elsewhere, so this is a fairly straightforward relocation.

[Riley Blue]

Vsix and Vtec said:

You'd be better off doing a full backup of C, reinstalling Windows on disc 0 and then doing a system restore from your full backup. Presumably you only have Windows on C, and all downloads and document files are elsewhere, so this is a fairly straightforward relocation.

Correct, downloads and data is on one of four external hard drives. I'm a bit twitchy about the whole thing so will give it plenty of thought.

[gavsdavs]

No, you can't concatenate disks like this without the use of a volume manager (not in your OS).
In any event, get all your data backed up before fiddling with partitions.

[eltawater]

Before you do any of this, you might want to check what types of disk you have.

Disk 0 may be 1TB but may be an old mechanical disk.
Disk 1 may only be 240GB but may be an SSD (and is the reason why Windows is installed there).

Reinstalling Windows onto the old Disk 0 mechanical disk may result in detrimental startup and general performance for Windows.

I can't tell from your screenshot whether the above is true, but you may wish to double check first....

[xeny]

eltawater said:

Disk 1 may only be 240GB but may be an SSD (and is the reason why Windows is installed there)

The size being 240GB reeks of being an SSD. Mechanical drives tended to be 160 or 320GB, and either would be obsolete at this point.

I suspect Disk 4 may be as well.

For the current price of reputable 500GB or 1TB SSDs, it may be worth the OP just buying a new internal boot drive.

[SO27]

Do you know what's consuming all of the space?

If it's your user account folders (Documents, Downloads, Pictures etc) you can get Windows to move them onto another drive.
Right click the Documents folder in File Explorer and open Properties. Select the Location tab and press the Move button and tell it where you want to put the contents. Repeat for the other folders.

Alternatively, TreeSize Free is a good utility to find out where your biggest folders and files are.

[dudleybloke]

Last time I had to do this was many many years ago, I used software called Partition Magic and it worked perfectly.

[Vsix and Vtec]

Partition Magic is good, but for the hassle of a 3rd party software (which you have to buy to do what OP wants, trial version won't do it) its not worth it.

I faced this same issue in the past on a clients PC, and its just not as easy or as fast as doing an install and restore. Especially if the install in on a decent SSD with a modern CPU.

I run my Windows installation off of two 240GB SSD in a RAID0 array, and again, id be looking at a reinstall if i wanted to upgrade or expand (not that i should need to)

[Mr Pointy]

Vsix and Vtec said:

Partition Magic is good, but for the hassle of a 3rd party software (which you have to buy to do what OP wants, trial version won't do it) its not worth it.

I faced this same issue in the past on a clients PC, and its just not as easy or as fast as doing an install and restore. Especially if the install in on a decent SSD with a modern CPU.

I run my Windows installation off of two 240GB SSD in a RAID0 array, and again, id be looking at a reinstall if i wanted to upgrade or expand (not that i should need to)

Cloning an OS disk is easy & you don't need to buy any software:

https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree

OP: download this & clone your OS drive to Disk 0 - you may have to mess about making it a boot partition so read up on it first. You won't modify your existing OS drive so you can always revert to it. Of course this is assuming Disk 0 is an SSD, if not the get a 1Gb one & clone to that. You may need a USB adapter cable but they are very cheap.

[edeath]

Just to echo 2 points here:

Treesize free in the first instance to work out what is taking up all of the space on your C drive as it may result in a lightbulb moment which resolves the problem

And double check if your smaller internal disk is an SSD and your larger is a mechanical HDD as swapping the boot drive from one to the other may result in a much slower PC. You can do this in task manager in the performance tab and it labels what each disk type is.

[gavsdavs]

Start with this
https://windirstat.net/

it will tell you where your space is disappearing to.

My bet is photos or downloads that you haven't located.

I'll repeat, you cannot and should not attempt to "extend" your C: partition (on disk1) using space from disk E: (disk0)
a) because your OS does not support disk concatenation without some form of volume manager
b) because you'll get inpredictable performance as they might be different types.
c) because you double the failiure risk without adding any resilience

[biggiles]

Do you need so many disks? You're running a higher risk of something failing.

Perhaps now is the time to move to simplified partitions using RAID for resilience (maybe time for a NAS?), and paying for something like Partition Magic to sort it all out.

Whatever you do, make a backup first! We've all made partition mistakes in our time...

[Whoozit]

To add yet another alternative... get a 512gb or 1tb SSD, mirror the C: drive to it.