HDD GURU FORUMS

I'm sorry, I don't know where to ask this so I'll ask here.

On my internal (laptop) HDD I have 2 partitions, C (OS - Win7) and D (data). Well, 3 partitions actually, if I count the reserved partition which doesn't have a letter. So, I'd like to merge C and D together into one single big partition before cloning my old HDD to a new SSD that I'm planning to use in my laptop instead of the old HDD.

How can I do that properly so that I'll have no problems whatsoever?

Thanx!

It goes without saying, you already have a backup of everything. If not, backup first, ask questions later.

Have you tried deleting D: from within Disk Management on Windows and then choose to expand partition C to full capacity (R-click on C and Expand)? I'm not sure it will work with OS partitions but you could try.
BACKUP FIRST.

If you have enough free space in the C partition, you can just copy things from D to it, then delete D and enlarge C.

If not enough space, you could copy things from D to another place ( external disk, etc ) , then delete D and enlarge C.

Some tools say they allow to merge partitions, but if the data in them is important, it would be better to have a full backup before.

That's a simple solution you offered, I haven't tought of it. I don't have enough space on C so I could use the second method - copy everything from D to another drive (it's about 300 GB of data), then delete D partition and enalarge C over the space where D partition was before. And then copy everything from the external drive to C. But! Is that even possible to do that in Windows 7, using the built-in Disk Management tool?

If that would really work, I would then defragment the HDD and then clone it to SSD. And then it should be as I wished.

Yes, it should work fine. As long as C: is before D: (which it pretty much should always be). Disk manager has no problem deleting and extending partitions. Just be sure to backup both partitions before doing it. If the partition table were to get tweaked then you'd end up needing to recover both of them.

Look what happens in this video, 2 minutes in:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Doo7QHpOVZ4

C partition won't extend. I think I tried this a while ago and faced the same problem...

Well, I told you you must delete D: to expand C: but it looks like my post was ignored.

Right, because the unallocated space has to be right next to the C partition in order to be able to expand using Disk Management in Windows 7. I will do that. Thank you all, hope it works.

@Bellzemos, if you defragment the D: partition, does this leave you with more than 300GB of free space? If so, then you could shrink the D: partition and create a new 300GB+ E: partition. Then copy the data from D: to E:, delete the D: partition, and then expand the C: partition. Of course it would still be advisable to backup to another HDD beforehand.

No, I have less than 150 GB free space on the D partition. I'll use an external drive. Thank you.