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Out of some senseless mentality, I had my Windows 7 partitioned into C and D where C is only 20gb. Now every time I install a program I need to change the path from C to D, furthermore, Windows Update and common program files are piling up and the C is totally running out of juice.

Is there a safe and easy way to merge the two partitions, or at least give up some space from D for C?

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In Windows 7, you can resize partitions even if they include your system volume. Just fire up Computer Management, then go to Disk Management (or use the command-line tool diskpart.exe).

You can not merge volumes, though; that would be very difficult to handle at the filesystem level (think about conflicting file names, etc.).

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  • probably the best bet is to shrink+move D over and grow C to fill the gap. Parted Magic also works for this (Linux live cd that emulated Partition magic but is Free =) ) Aug 17, 2010 at 10:56
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See http://www.partition-tool.com/

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Safe it isnt, 100% sure to work it isnt! I have used Partition Magic in the past which has worked very very well for me 99% of the time although I had had an occasion where it destroyed my setup! My advise is if you use a 3rd party utility have a very good backup just incase. I would if possible migrate windows to a stand alone drive and leave your data on your existing drive. Fdisk the partition out and back in to create unallocated space, this can then very very easily be merged back to your data drive. If you need more information let me know.

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Boot to a (free!) GParted Live CD and resize the D partition - by moving it's start point further along the drive - leaving space in to which you can extend the C partition.

Windows 7 has built in partitioning that is better than previous versions of Windows (even allowing modifications to the live system partition), but IIRC is not able to shrink or move a partition beyond where it has files. GParted will move the files as part of it's activtiy, allowing you to reposition the partitions as you see fit (although it might take a while if there's a lot of data to be moved!).

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On the commercial side, there are applications like Partition Magic and Acronis Director which will help in resizing existing partitions without any data loss. There are also open source and freeware/public domain applications available too - just search under "partition software" and a few choices should pop up.

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I have always used Acronis disk, Install the program, make the bootable CD, boot from it and make partition changes that way. Looks like they have a new version out.

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/diskdirector/

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