BleepingComputer.com: Deleting a partition

Hey,

My parents have just bought a new computer so I have taken their old one to give to my girlfriend but it needs ALOT of work done on it to get it running OK again.

My main problem is the hard drives. A while ago, a friend of my dads creating a partition (I think) - he made an F: drive by reducing the size of the C drive. I want to restore the C drive to full capacity if possible. I have deleted everything that was on the F drive but I cant seem to delete the F drive to give the C drive back all the memory.

I have attached a screen cap of my system management in the hope that I have explained myself well enough for someone to help.

Thanks :-)

That screenshot...reflects two distinct hard drives.

1 appears to be 10GB in size, while the other appears to be 80GB in size.

Louis

hamluis, on Jun 19 2009, 07:15 PM, said:

So its not the case that the C drive has been partitioned?

Is there anyway of making the C drive bigger? Somehow combining the two hard drives?

No...a hard drive is limited by physical size.

In Disk Management, when a hard drive has multiple partitions...or unallocated space (space not formatted), it reflects such as part of the physical disk.

Your visual reflects two distinct disks, one which is fully partitioned, while the other is unformatted/unpartitioned.

10GB isn't a lot of room, it is big enough for Windows XP and critical updates and programs (I have a 20GB partition on this system, but I have 10GB free space in my C:).

I would suggest removing a 10GB hard drive...after cloning it to your second drive. The second drive provides you with more working room and better alternatives. IMO, a 10GB hard drive is useless...portable/flash drives are that large and more flexible in usage.

If the idea of cloning your current install...to the larger hard drive...appeals to you, I can recommend a free tool: Home Edition of EASEUS Partition Master is a magic partition manager software for Windows 2000-XP-Vista-2003- - http://www.partition-tool.com/

As with any program...please read and follow all instructions before starting to monkey around with your partitions.

Louis

hamluis, on Jun 19 2009, 08:36 PM, said:

Yeah, the C drive is pretty much useless. My parents only used to have a C drive until their friend got his hands on it. For some reason, he moved everything that was on the D drive onto an F drive which he created. All the programs remained on C drive but they were constantly getting messages of "Low Disk Space" coming up and it was unworkable as Anti Virus software couldnt update due to lack of space.

If I clone the C drive onto the other hard drive, I presume the other hard drive would then become my main hard drive and would act as my C drive is currently only with a higher capacity?

Thanks for your help, much appreciated.

If you clone the 10GB onto the 80GB drive...using the software I linked to...the result will be an exact duplicate of your current install...just on a larger hard drive.

The process then becomes...turn system off, remove both drives from present locations...install 80GB drive where the 10GB used to be (and check the jumper setting)...and boot the system.

Louis

hamluis, on Jun 19 2009, 08:55 PM, said:

Awesome. Thanks alot. The computer only has the very basics on it at the moment as I have deleted everything off the 80GB hard drive so hopefully it wont be a long process.

Thanks again. I'll let you know how I get on

Keep us posted .

Louis