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I'm trying to re-partition my wife's computer. She has a Dell XPS 15 9550 laptop, and the hard drive is partitioned into a 30 GB section and a 470 GB section. The C drive, the operating system, and everything she's ever installed on the computer, are all located on the smaller partition.

I tried installing EaseUS partition manager to reallocate some of the data from the larger partition, which is mostly empty, to the smaller one, which is full to the point that the computer will no longer run windows updates. However, what the Microsoft partition manager indicated were two separate partitions show up as two different disks in EaseUS, as show below:

EaaseUS partition manager screen

Is it possible to re-partition some of the contents of the second "disk" into the first one? I converted the second one to GPT, thinking that I needed them to both be the same type of memory, but haven't had any success at reallocating memory from the D drive to the C drive.

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  • You have two physical disks in that machine. The smaller drive is a SSD, or that’s what I would guess it is, based on the size and device age. You won’t be able to “combine” those disks.
    – Ramhound
    Apr 21, 2018 at 16:14
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    There are two separate disk in that PC.
    – DavidPostill
    Apr 21, 2018 at 16:14

3 Answers 3

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You have a Solid State Hard Drive (SSHD) also known as a 'Hybrid drive.'

These drives contain fast storage for things like system files and some applications, but standard storage for everything else. Physically, it is a single drive that has some flash memory sitting on it.

These SSHDs give the benefit of offering fast system performance (booting up, etc) with a lower price point than a full on SSD. Remember SSDs used to be extremely expensive per GB, so this was a great way for manufacturers to boast fast performance in the OS at a lower production cost!

You cannot merge these partitions together.

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  • What would be the best approach to freeing up memory on the C drive, then? Is it possible to transfer the program files over to the D drive?
    – ckersch
    Apr 21, 2018 at 16:31
  • This is possible however it is not as simple as copying and pasting. You must create a link from the old location to the new one, I would suggest doing some research as there are some programs designed for this (as we are now in a different question). Apr 21, 2018 at 16:35
  • Furthermore, I would suggest looking up how to move your Librariries such as documents etc, onto your 'data drive' I have a 60GB SSD for my OS so I feel your pain! It just takes some proper management and it will be okay ! google.com/amp/s/www.pcworld.com/article/2110095/… Apr 21, 2018 at 16:37
  • @ckersch May be you just replace the drive with a new SSD - SSDs got so cheap lately. Then everything is on a fast disk.
    – Robert
    Apr 21, 2018 at 18:55
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Another simple way is to mirror disk 0 and its drives to the larger drive which i have done with the Disk Manager here in the image. You can see its 6% copied in the screen shot. When this is done just disconnect the old disk and extend your new C drive into the free space on your new drive.

C partition being mirrored.jpg

With windows almost hidden disk manager (from start menu right click Computer then Manage then go to Storage -> Disk Management) do the following:

All you do is connect the new disk (it needs to be unallocated so you need to delete all partitions on the new disk).

You then convert Disk 0 (your old disk) to a "Dynamic disk" by right clicking on the grey Disk 0 box. This is a one way operation but its safe. When its converted you can select any partition and mirror it to the 2nd disk Disk 1. This will make Disk 1 a dynamic disk also, and start syncing your C drive. After that you can disconnect the old drive. and boot with the new disk which has the space to extend C into the extra available space.

If you dont like that way you may want to try the MS backup and restore option where you restore to the new disk using some backup disk and have a bood disk created for the restore. I have not used that but here is a good guide https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKgdw2m9oeI

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Oh i actually found how to do this.

Go to Disk Manager and right click on an unallocated block on your new drive and select

New Simple Volume ...

Select the amount of space for the new volume. (say 200 meg for testing) and select Next. Instead of assigning a drive letter in the next screen use the option

Mount in the following empty NTFS folder

now click browse button and open the C: drive and create a new folder in there with the requestor like C:\new drive. Then click next, and take the defaults on the next 2 screens.

now you have C:/new drive which mounts this other disk with 200 meg partition

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