A Windows 7 laptop I commonly use has an internal hard drive that is partitioned into the primary Windows partition, drive C, and an extra partition, drive D, that is also NTFS and is positioned adjacent to drive C; this is followed by unallocated space that used to be another NTFS partition (drive E). My goal is to delete partition D and allocate all HD space to C, however Disk Management will not delete drive D and I am running out of space on drive C. How could I remove drive D without formatting drive C and having to reinstall Windows?
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1"Disk Management will not delete drive D" Any error messages? Menu item is greyed out? What exactly happens?– gronostajSep 21, 2014 at 17:43
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Your best way would be to use an external system, such as Hiren's Boot CD (hiren.info/pages/bootcd) or using parted on a Linux Live CD. But make sure first that D: is not needed for recovery.– AFHSep 21, 2014 at 17:51
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Make sure the partition is disabled before attempting to delete it.– JonahSep 21, 2014 at 19:04
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@gronostaj The menu item ("Delete Partition") is grayed out.– Pi ProgramsSep 22, 2014 at 0:46
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@Jonah How would I disable the partition? Would I delete its drive letter assignment?– Pi ProgramsSep 22, 2014 at 0:58
2 Answers
Disk management is the worst disk partition tool I've ever encountered. In my opinion the best partition management tool is Gparted.
You can download the Gparted iso file from here then make a bootable usb drive with Unetbootin. Here's a complete guide for that.
Hope it works out for you.
The last time I used the computer, I found that "Delete Partition" was no longer grayed out for drive D (I am not sure what caused this); I backed up necessary data, deleted drive D, and extended drive C to fill the entire hard drive using Disk Management.