Protocol for combining partitions in a single HD into one big "C:"drive--when you buy a bigger drive--how?

Problem: Just doubled my SSD hard drive from 500 GB to 1000 GB, but I have a problem. There is just one physical drive, but several logical drives and up to three or four primary drives (the maximum).

I want to move the new, approximately 500 GB of unallocated space at the end of my "D" (data) drive to my "C" (bootable) drive. Note I used a tool already to expand my old "D" drive to include the unallocated space of the new drive.

In between (before and after) the "C" and "D" drives there are other small (1 to 10 GB) primary drives (that I can probably safely delete) created by an anti-virus program I used to have, from Macrium Reflect (on startup, this is useful a bit, in that it avoids the UEFI BIOS), as well as the stupid Lenovo "recovery" partition that came with this laptop. I will reformat all these partitions except the Macrium Reflect partition, which appears on bootup, and I find useful.

Here is the problem: how to move the new unallocated space that's now tacked onto the "D" drive to the "C" drive, if the configuration is not adjacent? OR, BETTER YET, MAKE ALL THE PARTITIONS INTO ONE BIG "C" DRIVE? (MY REVISED PLAN)

The system hard drive configuration is something like this, as /*/ represents disc volume boundaries:

/*/ Macrium bootup (active, primary) /*/ C: Drive (Boot, Page Dump, Crash, Primary) /*/ Lenovo Recovery Disk (Primary) /*/ D: drive (logical drive) /*/


OK, I figured out my action plan, since I will make all the partitions into one big "C:" drive, except the Macrium partition, which is useful on bootup to avoid UEFI BIOS if you want to restore a Macrium Image file.

Action plan / Protocol (my question to the group):

1. Format "Lenovo Recover Disk" to all zeros using the freeware tool below, since I don't need it.
2. Combine it with all adjacent drives like the "D" drive.
3. (optional?) backup all data off of the "D" drive to an external USB drive, reformat "D", then merge with the "C" drive using the freeware below. But maybe no need to refomat the "D" drive? Not sure. But just in case I will backup my D: drive data to an external USB drive.

Problem solved?

I await your advice.

RL



Internet: "However, Disk Management has many limitations. For example, you cannot move unallocated space to C drive if the unallocated space is not adjacent to the C drive, or the adjacent unallocated space is not at its right side. Because the Extend Volume would be grayed out, and you can't use this way to add the unallocated space to your system partition. "

https://www.hdd-tool.com/windows-10/...ted-space.html
As the safest and fastest partitioning software, NIUBI Partition Edition can extend C drive with Unallocated space no matter it is adjacent or not. Furthermore, free space inside of any other drives in the same disk can be transferred to C drive, too. (NOTE: I found this freeware useful, but I don't think it allows partition extending if not adjacent, certainly I could not figure it out--RL)

On Thursday, May 2, 2019 at 2:27:09 AM UTC-4, RayLopez99 wrote:

Well I did it, and it worked. That was the simplest solution, simply progressively merge adjacent 'volumes' into one. I did not need to reformat the D: (data) drive. But I reformatted the 10 GB "Lenovo Recovery" drive since I did not want the garbage programs on it to get on my C: drive, it might cause confusion.

Also I don't think there's an easy way to move or merge non-adjacent partitions into one another. You have to stick with merging adjacent partitions.

Windows built-in partition manager will do that, as will the more visual freeware out there.

RL

RayLopez99 wrote:
On Thursday, May 2, 2019 at 2:27:09 AM UTC-4, RayLopez99 wrote:

Well I did it, and it worked. That was the simplest solution, simply progressively merge adjacent 'volumes' into one. I did not need to reformat the D: (data) drive. But I reformatted the 10 GB "Lenovo Recovery" drive since I did not want the garbage programs on it to get on my C: drive, it might cause confusion.

Also I don't think there's an easy way to move or merge non-adjacent partitions into one another. You have to stick with merging adjacent partitions.

Windows built-in partition manager will do that, as will the more visual freeware out there.

RL

I think a steam roller with 1000HP motor will do the job.

Oh, you already did that.

Carry on.

*******

There are two ways to use Macrium.

1) Process an entire disk. Likely what you did when
cloning "something" to the new drive.

2) Process an old disk, to a new disk, one partition at a time.
This allows using a bit of Disk Management, a bit of Macrium,
to "build" things up the way you want from left to right.
Then, use the Macrium Emergency CD "Boot Repair" to finish the disk.
Have *only* the target disk present, Macrium on a CD, boot
repair the disk, then try booting the disk on the target computer.

In addition, you could have used Macrium as in (1),
then used a partition manager to resize.

To make space for C: , you need to "move" the partitions
that are on the right, more towards the right. You can't do these
with Disk Management, but you can do this with free partition
managers. Paragon version 14 free partition tool, Easeus,
and so on. Perhaps even Linux GParted if you want.

==
+-----+-----------+--------+--------+--------+---------------+
| MBR | C: drive | small1 | small2 | small3 | unallocated |
+-----+-----------+--------+--------+--------+---------------+

==
+-----+-----------+--------+--------+---------------+--------+
| MBR | C: drive | small1 | small2 | unallocated | small3 |
+-----+-----------+--------+--------+---------------+--------+

==
+-----+-----------+--------+---------------+--------+--------+
| MBR | C: drive | small1 | unallocated | small2 | small3 |
+-----+-----------+--------+---------------+--------+--------+

Now, you're in a position to resize the C: partition to the right
and make it use the unallocated space. This is not "Merge",
this is "Expand" and is available in Disk Management (or the
Partition Manager you were using).

+-----+-----------+---------------+--------+--------+--------+
| MBR | C: drive | unallocated | small1 | small2 | small3 |
+-----+-----------+---------------+--------+--------+--------+

+-----+---------------------------+--------+--------+--------+
| MBR | C: drive | small1 | small2 | small3 |
+-----+---------------------------+--------+--------+--------+

Paul

On Thursday, May 2, 2019 at 4:01:09 AM UTC-4, Paul wrote:

I think a steam roller with 1000HP motor will do the job.

Oh, you already did that.

Carry on.


Yeah, right you are Paul. I did not use finesse.

But it worked.

Since I don't do this that often, I doubt I could learn your slick way of doing things...

One thing I did notice, when I did a "merge" of two partitions: the stuff like data (Word files, photos) in the one partition was copied onto the other partition with a new date; that sucks! Completely ruins whatever metadata you have in your files, like your .docx file creation dates.

But, anticipating something screwy would happen, I had used 7-zip to compress the old folder, which preserved the metadata (dates of the files) and thus I was able to restore to the newly created merged partition all the old, 'uncopied' data comprising my old Word files, photos etc with their metadata.

Another screwball thing was Microsoft "OneDrive", does not automatically and instantly "sync" online the hard drive and the cloud! Hence I had just after doing a Macrium Image backup, sent some new fresh files to the "OneDrive" folder on my HD, thinking they were online---but they were not! In fact, they reside on my old small hard drive that I replaced. But, luckily or rather by design, I have this old drive, I mounted it to another PC, and, like you said, even though it was a "C" drive the Win10 OS was smart enough to know it was not really a "C" drive in this other computer, and, I went to the OneDrive folder in this old hard drive, and voila, there are all my new "fresh" files created just after I did a Macrium backup image of the hd.. Stupid Microsoft (a great stock to own, we have some as investors) does not prominently tell people that OneDrive is not automatically syncing all the time, but only periodically, and hence you can lose data if you're not careful. (Googling this, I see Microsoft at one time did automatically and instantly sync the HD with the cloud, but no longer does so, relying instead on periodic syncs at random times, which should be emphasized more to their users).

A trap for the unwary.

RL

On Thu, 2 May 2019 00:16:55 -0700 (PDT), RayLopez99
wrote:

On Thursday, May 2, 2019 at 2:27:09 AM UTC-4, RayLopez99 wrote:

Well I did it, and it worked. That was the simplest solution, simply progressively merge adjacent 'volumes' into one. I did not need to reformat the D: (data) drive. But I reformatted the 10 GB "Lenovo Recovery" drive since I did not want the garbage programs on it to get on my C: drive, it might cause confusion.

Also I don't think there's an easy way to move or merge non-adjacent partitions into one another. You have to stick with merging adjacent partitions.

I wouldn't say it's difficult. Some partition managers let you
copy/paste or cut/paste partitions exactly like you almost certainly
already do with files. My preferred partition manager, MiniTool
Partition Manager Free (https://www.partitionwizard.com/), only allows
the copy operation, but that's enough to get your partitions arranged as
you want them. Once arranged, just merge and you're done.

Windows built-in partition manager will do that, as will the more visual freeware out there.

I don't think too highly of Windows Disk Management. For all but the
most basic things, you'll want something better.