Filed under: Utilities, Freeware, Ask DLS, Troubleshooting

Help! Some idiot partitioned my giant hard drive!

by Lee Mathews (RSS feed) Nov 16th 2008 at 2:00PM

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!