Can I merge partitions in Vista and 7?

[Kantastic]

I'm looking to merge the C and D partitions in both my systems, the hassle of having to make sure I have space on the C drive and change every download/installation to the D drive is really annoying. How exactly can I do this if the C drives on both computers are have Windows installed and are the boot drives? Some of my terminology might be wrong, so please do excuse me if I misused some words.

[JTS]

It's probably a bit late and you may already have your answer by now, but:

Do you wish to delete the D:\ partition and have just one large partition as C:\?

Are both Vista and Seven installed on the same HDD, with Vista being installed first, or are you talking about two separate computers, one with Vista and the other with Seven, both partitioned into a C: and D: configuration?

If you wish to merge both partitions, you will have to delete the d:\ partition to extend/reclaim the space (which will erase all the contents of D:\)

To do this you can use Disk Management to delete the D:\ partition and then extend the C:\ volume to reclaim the unused space.


Right-click "Computer > Manage and in Computer Management it's under Storage > Disk Management"

Example:

[Kantastic]

It's 2 computers both with the C:/D: config. I tried deleting some of the space in D but the disk manager would not allow me to extend C:.

[JTS]

When you say '"tried deleting some of the space", are you talking about deleting files, shrinking the D:\ volume, or deleting the entire partition?

Windows Disk Management cannot 'extend to the left' of a physical partition. It can only reclaim (extend a volume) of unused space to the right of a physical partition.

3rd party tools like GParted (free) or Paragon's Partition Manager (not free) can extend volumes to the left.



It sounds like you may have shrunk the D:\ volume, which left the unallocated space after the D:\ partition.

So the partition layout would look like this:

C:\ xGB D:\ xGB xUnallocted/unused (x is the amount of GB)


Could you post a screenshot of Disk Management?