When Vista's Disk Management tool refuses to resize your
partition...
The Challenge
Your hard disk is
partitioned to two or more drives in your system (typically C: and
another drive letter such as D: or E:).
You are running out of space on your C: drive*. It is 50 GB in size but
now has only 4 GB free. Your D: drive is 60 GB big and is unused. You
would like to combine C: with D: resulting in a single big C: drive
(having 110 GB) and no D: drive.
The Problem
You know about the powerful features via Control Panel > System
and
Maintenance > Administrative Tools > Create and Format
Hard Disk
Partitions which allow you to resize partitions on your hard disk. You
expect it to use that tool to accomplish just that: extend your C: at
the expense of your D:.
However, when you try doing this, you discover that the Disk Management
tool in Windows Vista allows you to shrink the C: drive or
shrink/extend the D: drive but
doesn't allow you to extend
the C: drive... What's going on? Have you missed anything?
The Solution
In order to extend C: using the
space in the D: drive,
D: needs to be both unallocated
and on the same disk as C:.
If D: has already been allocated and formatted, simply delete D: using
the
Disk Management tool in Windows Vista by right-clicking D: and
selecting from the context menu the menu item:
Delete
Volume...
Warning: Deleting
a disk volume is an
irreversible operation. Before doing so, make sure that you have no
information on the volume you delete or that you are ready to dispense
of what's already on the volume to be deleted.
If you found this tiphelpful,
please share it with others:
* if you
ever wondered why your C: drive runs out of space so quickly, please
read about Vista's System Restore feature
here.
For disk related tweaks and enhancements, click the browse
button (or click the search button to enter your favorite
keyword):
(if you didn't find what you are looking
for,
simply submit to us your problem description via
this link.)
.
