I have 5.5 GB left free out of 58.5GB, the bar showing Windows 7 Professional 64 Bit display is red, presumably meaning critically full.
The following method has been recommended:
Go to Disk Management
Notice that “extend volume” of your C: drive is “ghosted” and you are unable to select it (right click); you need to have “free unallocated disk space” immediately next to this partition to its right. (As it is likely your D: partition is right next to it - you CAN NOT add the D: partition or part of it to your C: drive.)
You have to DELETE your D: partition completely (this means you will need to copy/save any files on your D: partition first). Right click on the D: partition and delete it. This will free up the entire 400+ GB of space on your drive and will create and place the “unallocated free space” immediately to the right of your C: drive.
You will now see that when you right click on the C: drive that the option to “extend” your C: drive is now available. Click “Extend…” and then option windows will open. At that point you may choose to allocate all remaining free space to your C: drive OR you may allocate whatever amount you’d like to your C: drive. You are then allowed to recreate your D: drive with the remaining unallocated free space.
Guaranteed that works; I just did it 3 minutes ago.
Yes. One of the problems with partitioning drives is having to re-allocate space when one of the partitions gets full.
Partitioning was efficient in the old days. Not needed any more with today’s modern drives.
I don’t know about safe (working with partitions can be dangerous), what I would have thought that the Deletion of Drive D: to be somewhat severe. But System Tools probably aren’t as flexible. I have never used system tools to resize/partition HDDs, I have used partitioning software many times over the years and have never needed to delete a partition to be able to extend drive C:.
There are many Disk Partitioning applications out there some of them free that should be able to do this with possibly less hassle involved. Like resizing the Drive D: without having to delete the data and then extend the C: drive into the free space created. I have used an old program (no longer available) called Partition Magic on many of my old systems.
I’m only commenting on the instructions, pasted/written by the OPs whomever may have written them.
2) You have to DELETE your D: partition completely (this means you will need to copy/save any files on your D: partition first). Right click on the D: partition and delete it. This will free up the entire 400+ GB of space on your drive and will create and place the "unallocated free space" immediately to the right of your C: drive.
To me that is a nuclear option as you lose what is on your D: partition, unless you have an external HDD to backup the partition. There are tools that don’t require the deletion of the drive, just reduce its size and allocate that unused space for extending the C: drive.
Thanks for posting those diagrams. When the guy wrote “Disk Management” I assumed he meant go to Windows Explorer and right-click on Drive C to see the options he referred to. But that didn’t work on either C or D drive.
Unfortunately my Windows system is in German and the nearest option is Systemsteuerung (system management) which gives you 50 different options, but none of them concerned drives on the hard disk.
I would be grateful if you could teel in in plain English how you got to the Disk Management screen you illustrated, tackling the German should be no problem once there:)
My Drive D has a capacity of 90GB only 4GB used, these files are on it (see attachment). Having deleted these (I have no idea what they are) how would I reallocate the 90 GB to Drive C?
Thanks for the link https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-open-disk-management-2626080 which shows me how to access Disk Management on Win 7.
To delete the D partition and assign the unallocated space to the C drive, I would presumably need to go to Disk Management, not possible via Win Explorer.
According to disk manager and windows explorer my C Drive capacity has now increased from now 58.5GB to 149.95GB, leaving the 90GB extra from Drive D available. A good result. The result I wanted anyway.
The prompt on disk manager only gave the option to either reduce or delete “volume” on D, so I deleted the 5GB shown in the diagram to DavidR. As far as I know I did not delete the partition - just what was on it. Drive D no longer appears on disk manager though.
I has no idea what these files were, but I assume they are gone. (It is a second hand laptop I bought because I was not happy with Win 10 and wanted 7…so the previous owner may have put those there…hoping there was nothing system-critical in them).
Sorry you’ve got issue with your new account. Maybe someone can help with that issue?
I’ve never thought it a good idea to partition a drive into multiple drives because:
What happens to all of your data when your drive dies?
Now you’ve lost everything. And the point of creating a second drive was to safeguard you(r) data.
Always better to install a second hard drive or three and use them as your backups.
No issue with new account. I am only surprised I managed to post for so long with “brompeter”, before signing up with a new email address as “brompeter2”.
Drive D
You are right, I too assumed they would go. The idea was to extend my Drive C which now has the added capacity. It booted fine today.
As mentioned - no idea what those files (see post to DavidR above) were ding there. It is a second hand laptop I bought as it was the way of reverting to windows 7 I knew of.
Those files look strange, but not totally unseen, but we would need to know the actual location on that D: drive, sometimes they related to windows update (more so in preparation to update to win10) and on occasion also avast emergency update checks. But both would be protected files and in specific locations.
I expect you noticed that my Windows7 is installed in German. Fortunately my German is pretty good so I have been able to work my way round it. I am told that I cannot switch the OS to English without re-installing Windows 7, which I have no means of doing.
Is that true?
Thanks - “sometimes they related to windows update (more so in preparation to update to win10)”.
That is a good guess, since in summer 2015 I tried out the free Win 10 upgrade. I dint like it and used the ‘revert to 7’ option.
re - “we would need to know the actual location on that D: drive”
The files I attached in the screenshot of my ex-Drive D in my reply to you yesterday, were all that Explorer could give me about that Drive, and were all deleted. As to where they were on Drive D - the screenshot was all I knew. I have since run CCleaner twice which always do whenever I shut down, and about 600 MB in total were CC-cleaned.
