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General discussion

Restoring HD back eo one partition

Jan 1, 2011 6:03PM PST

Hi guys and thanks in advance for any help.

My mum has run out of room on her little laptop but upon inspection it looks like someone has partitioned the hard drive.

Is there a way of getting that space back onto the c drive without losing everything thats already on the c drive?

Discussion is locked

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Depends which OS
Jan 1, 2011 7:05PM PST

If this is Windows Vista or Windows 7 then it might be possible. XP and earlier may be difficult. I don't know about Mac or Linux.

But may be it is not necessary? You don't give any details so all we can give are rough guesses, but, for example, if the system has two partitions, C and D, why not move all personal files like documents, photos, videos, and music to the D drive?

If this is some 'hidden' partition then it's best not to change anything as likely that is the "Recovery Partition" to be used to reinstall the OS if necessary.

But again, those missing details hamper us.

Mark

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A good place to start...
Jan 1, 2011 7:17PM PST

Again if this is Windows, have a look at Grif's list of "Useful tips" in the Sticky thread at the top of this forum.

In particular, his notes on How To Clean Unwanted Files From The Hard Drive.

There is a lot of very good information in that thread.

Mark

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Mark has good information . . .
Jan 4, 2011 9:11PM PST

But to answer your question, the answer is "chancy". Software that repartitions a hard drive can "error" and you loose everything on the drive. If there is some way to save what she can't loose, such as pictures, music, data, etc. do that first. Then you can repartition.

But then again, as Mark says, a good cleanup may do wonders.

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You could try gparted.
Jan 22, 2011 6:12AM PST

Also you didn't specify the operating system. If it's Vista or 7 (not sure about XP.. you can probably do it in XP.. haven't used it in ages), go in disk management and resize partition.

Note that if you delete the other partition (and if there's Linux + GRUB bootloader on it), you'll get a missing GRUB error when you boot (aka you can't boot up into any OS)