Wednesday 7 January 2015

Merge Two Partitions in Windows 7

First, right-click on Computer on the desktop and choose Manage.




manage computer

Next click on Disk Management in the left hand navigation pane:

disk management

Now on the right hand pane, you’ll see a  list of volumes at the top and the list of disks at the bottom.


disk partitions

As you can see in the example above, I have a C and E volume. The C volume is my System partition that includes the operating system and paging file. The E volume is just a second primary partition that’s about 10 GB in size. What we want to do here is to merge these two partitions so that the C partition becomes 60 GB instead of 50 GB.

 The first thing we need to do is to right-click on the E partition at the bottom and choose Delete Volume.



delete volume

You’ll get a warning stating that deleting the volume will erase all data on it. You should make sure you have backed up anything on that volume first before you do this. Once you delete it, you’ll see it becomes Unallocated space.

unallocated space

Now to merge the partitions, simple right-click on the partition you want to extend (C in my case) and choose Extend Volume.


extend volume

The wizard will open, so click Next. On the Select Disk screen, it should automatically select the disk and show the amount from any unallocated space.

extend volume win 7

As you can see, the wizard found 9999 MB of unallocated space which I can use to extend the C volume. Click Next and then click Finish. Now you’ll see the first partition (C volume) has been extended and includes all the space on the disk.


extended volume

That’s it! Yes, with this method you have to delete a partition and back up the data, but at least you don’t have to worry about any third party software and paying for anything. It’s not too hard to just copy some data to an external hard drive and then copy it back later. If you have any questions, post a comment! Enjoy!

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