Running XP Home. Originally I had a C: drive and my CD R/W was the D: drive. I partitioned the C: drive into 2 partitions, a 30Gig (C:) and a 50Gig (became E:). I loaded XP on the E: drive (Don't ask. I don't even remember why. I must have had a reason.). Since then I have added 2 more HDs. The new HDs became D: and F: and the CD became G:. That was then. It has worked for over a year.

I needed to install a new version of XP. I cleaned out the C: drive and, wanting to be more conventional, installed XP there. Then I reformatted the rest of that physical drive (The E: partition) and, using the Disc Manager turned it into Free Space. Is this confusing?

Anyway, now I have a HD which is named C: which has the system on it and has 50G of free space.

How can I add the Free Space to the C: drive so that it thinks it is an 80G drive?

As far as I know, you would need to delete BOTH partitions (C: and E:) so that it would only be recognised as a physical drive (no partitions). Of course the problem is that you have already installed your OS on the C drive. I guess you would need to install your OS on another drive (not C or E) and delete both partitions, and then reinstall your OS on you newly formatted C drive...? Maybe?

God, I hope not.
Actually, what I have is
1. An 80G physical HD which is partitioned to 30G (C:) with the remaining 50G as Free Space. In the disk manager the free space shows up as being separate from the C: drive.
2. A 120G physical drive which is D:
3. A 250G physical drive which is E:
4. My CD is F:

Some time in the distant past I appended the free space on a physical drive to the partitioned part of the drive. I don't know how I got to the place where I had that as an option (I probably blundered into it), but there is a way to do it. I wish I would have the presence of mind to write this stuff down when I come across it.

I am here to tell you that I haven't been able to put together the words to enter into the XP Help routine to get to the answers I need. It said if I defragmented a HD it would pick up any free space on the drive. It meant that it would pick up any free space in the partition.

Maybe there is a way to re-partition the C: drive to 80G, but if there is, I don't know where to find it. I am just hoping someone on the forum remembers.

as far as I remember from past versions of windows and MS disk utilities you cannot add more space to an already existing partition. I assume you are using the disk management built into XP, but there are more advanced utilities (that I have never used) like Partition Magic which can do that for you, but carry the risk of messing up your existing partion. They might ruin the whole physical drive in a worst case, but I'm not sure. Try and make an image of your C: and store it on D: or E: temporarily if you have the room and the utilities to do such a task. That way you at least will have something to fall back on if you have to reformat the whole C: to merge.


edit- I just played around with my disk management and did not see a way to add space to a partition whether it was Primary or a logical drive in an extended partition. I was able to add my drive's extra space to my C: by adding it as an "empty NTFS folder" instead of a drive letter. If your drive supports this you could try it, I'm not really sure how it works or what the requirements are besides being NTFS formatted. Unless someone else knows a way around destroying the primary partition with windows you'll have to look into Partition magic or something like that. Much luck

I weenied out and popped the XP disc in the CD on startup; got to the place where I Deleted the C: drive after which Windows found the whole physical disk and called it [RAW]. I reformatted it and reinstalled XP.

It's all better now. I can install applications on the C: drive and there's plenty of room. I don't keep getting the dire warning that my C: drive is almost full any more. I only had 56Meg left. Good grief, go back a few years; 56Meg was a TON of drive space. I remember when the computer expert, who shall remain nameless, said that no home computer would ever need more than 16k of ram. Things sure do change.

Thanks JPHARVEY and GOTHMOG, I seriously thought it was worth a try.

yeah, my first HD was 500 Mb and that lasted quite a bit. I think my next had 8Gb. Now some games install and eat 2-5 GB no problem. 16k, wow, that must've been before my first comp, that had 4 mb. I think I still have the Ram chip somewhere...