Help! Some idiot partitioned my giant hard drive!

Filed under: Utilities, Freeware, Ask DLS, Troubleshooting

Help! Some idiot partitioned my giant hard drive!

by Lee Mathews Nov 16th 2008

Steve, a loyal DS reader, left this comment on my listing of five apps to clone hard drives:

"Some idiot (my friend) partitioned my 1TB drive @ 10gb just to start me off and I can't do anything. I have partitioned/formatted the rest of my drive and cloned onto the new partition but I can't get rid of my C drive to use my new partition as my main drive. Any suggestions? Please help."

Ah, yes. The well-meaning friend with just enough computer knowledge to be dangerous. While it's certainly a good idea to partition a large drive, ten gigs may have been a bit on the miserly side - and it sounds like our reader didn't really want his new drive partitioned in the first place.

Now what? Fortunately, there are a number of good, free apps that will allow him to combine the two partitions into a single large one, or resize them to more reasonable capacities.

Easeus Partition Manager Home Edition is probably the easiest free software to use, and the option I'd recommend to most casual users. The interface is easy to understand, and resizing or combining partitions is fairly fool proof. Download and extract the zip file, run the installer, and you're good to go - the application runs right in Windows.

Parted Magic is another great option. It's built on Linux but offers a similar graphical interface and can handle just about any partition you can imagine. I'd offer a download link on the project's home page, but it was recently hacked and is still offline. In the meantime, get it from Linuxquestions.org.

Burn it to a disk and force your computer to boot to the CD (on many mainboards hold F8 or F11 at the POST screen will invoke a boot selection menu, but check your motherboard manual to be sure).

Boot with either of these, delete your 990gb partition, and expand the 10gb c: partition to whatever size you like. It won't take long, and you won't have to reinstall anything. I'd recommend leaving a second partition big enough to store a recovery image of your c: drive once you've got things situated.

Good luck, Steve!

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)

RazorD said 2:34PM on 11-16-2008

Its probably worth noting that every single time i've tried to modify a partition on windows, it's ending up breaking and loosing all my data.. so make sure you have a backup first ;)

polobunny said 3:12PM on 11-16-2008

And on the other end I've never had a problem. ;)
Sadly, one user experience is hardly worth noting.

Mc.Fishie said 4:27PM on 11-16-2008

It's because windows needs to use it's own partition tools to resize C: I had the same problem :)

(Partition Magic works though)

Luke (Mc.Fishie)

John said 12:02PM on 11-17-2008

and it's happened to me about half the time.. so that basically covers the full spectrum there.

Lesson:
Always back up your important files/data

David said 4:17PM on 11-16-2008

Just to make sure before I try, is it possible to combine two or more partitions without loosing the data on them?

Peter said 5:44PM on 11-16-2008

David - If both partitions currently have data on them and you want to retain all the data on both, I don't think so. Usually the procedure would be to delete one partition and expand the other into the resulting free space.
You might be able to shrink one partition and expand the other so there is enough space on the larger one for all the data, copy the data over and then remove the smaller partition and recover the free space.

David said 6:14PM on 11-16-2008

Oh sorry, I wasn't clear. I want to retain the data on only one of the partitions. I have a 200 gig drive partitioned 3 times to 100, 60, and 40. The 60 and 40 partitions had linux on them, so I don't care if I lose them, but the 100 I absolutely need. Is this possible?

Lee Mathews said 6:15PM on 11-16-2008

Delete the two linux partitions first, then expand your 100gb to fill the drive. It SHOULD leave your data intact, but always back up first!

Peter said 6:32PM on 11-16-2008

You can do it the way Lee described, but a safer option would be to leave the first 100 gig as-is for your OS and applications and make a separate 100 gig from the two Linux partitions for your data.
Keeping your OS and your data on 2 different partitions makes life A LOT easier and safer. It also makes backups easier and smaller.

David said 6:44PM on 11-16-2008

Ok thanks guys! I just ran Easeus and everything went fine! Deleted the partitions, resized the good one, rebooted, and everything worked! No data lost! But just out of curiosity, Easeus does not have the bootable iso, that's Parted Magic, right? Maybe you should edit that...

David said 6:47PM on 11-16-2008

@ Peter:
Sorry I didn't see that. Yeah, I actually have a two drives, a 20 gig that Windows is on by itself, and a 200 gig for all my files. I figure if anything goes wrong with Windows, I can just reinstall on the 20 gig without any damage to my files. Now to just fix my MBR.....

Fred Thompson said 5:43PM on 11-16-2008

I've never had any problems with partition editing other than when I tried to edit the boot partition on a running Windows install. Duh...

Gnome Partition Editor http://gparted.sourceforge.net/index.php and Ultimate Boot CD http://ubcd.sourceforge.net/ have really good tools.

BigD said 6:55PM on 11-16-2008

Always assume data will be lost - I'm pretty sure the data on the 'following partition' will be lost. It is usually much faster to back up the data, wipe the drive and start over anyways. Moving all that data around takes a long time...

Remember that Windows wants to be on the first partition and to flag it as boot - right click on the drive and choose manage flags then check the box next to boot in GParted. That's assuming your booting into Windows and not using Grub and a Linux distro, of course. Even so, Windows always on the first partition.

Remember to that XP has issues installing onto an SATA drive as well. But that's a whole 'nother blog...

James said 7:25PM on 11-16-2008

GParted gets my vote -- practically brainless, and fast too. Just don't make the mistake I did and try to include the 8 megs of slack space Gateway stupidly left at the beginning of your drive -- GParted had to move all the data on the partition 8 megs to the left, which took *forever*.

BananaBoat said 7:54PM on 11-16-2008

I had the unfortunate experience of partitioning a drive to use in a new computer, and installing windows only to find out that the 10gb C drive I picked wasn't set up as the first partition...even though it was physically the first partition. That's what happens when you try to do anything from within windows. Take the advice above, and use PartitionMagic recovery disc, or a live Ubuntu disc, or one of the other linux live distros, then do your partitioning (or de-partitioning) from there.

liar said 8:01PM on 11-16-2008

You guys know about diskmgmt.msc right? I don't know for sure if it's in your version of widows, but it's built into my win2k pro. Just type it into run and check it out.

Doc Gonzo said 12:53PM on 11-17-2008

It is built-in, but you can't merge or expand partitions with it...

Steve said 10:13PM on 11-16-2008

Thanks Lee!!!!! The Easeus Partion Manager worked great. I really appreciate the help and support you have provided.

I will share this site with my friends in need.

Steve

shitu said 8:53AM on 11-17-2008

Ask Raymond.cc
He is genius!!

Ben said 10:53AM on 11-17-2008

10GB is about all you need for a windows XP install. Everything else should be on a different partition anyway

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