Partitioning question

Hello,

I have a 80GB harddisk in my laptop, which is divided in 2 partitions, C:and D:. Today I bought an external drive and transferred all of D:'s contents to the external drive. Now, I'd like to remove the D: partition and take all it's space back to the C: one. I'm new to this thing, I've tried googling but I've seen some cases where the contents of both patitions were erased...

So which free or trial program can I use to make this quickly and without risks?

 

Without risks would be a 3rd party app like Partition Magic or something. You just highlight your d: drive (assuming that is the extended partition) and then remove/delete. Then you resize your c: (primary partition) to the full size.

I have used fdisk in the past. I don't know but you are probably ntfs, so I have not looked how to do that.

You could also image your drive c:, then format your hdd with no partitions, then put your image back on c:, which will at this point be max size.

Or, there are other ways. This is the basic, per program is different yet same.

Sul.

Edit: On second thought, if it were me, and there was room on the external, I would make an image and put it on the external. The only problem here is that you need to be sure the image is 'pure'. Myself I would delete everything I could from my c:, including the swap file and if hibernation is used, hiberfil file, basically all unneeded files, then I would image it (makes image that much smaller). Short of having another hdd to swap for yours right now, you will not know if the image is good or not though.

 

I did something similar just a few days ago. I used shadowprotect to take an image of my windows volume. Went into the boot cd, deleted the partition i did not want and put the image over the whole harddrive.

 

After messing up with my drive, I wrongly converted it in a dynamic drive, then I got really scared but finally found a way to reconvert it into a basic drive. ...

Anyway, I just used EASEUS Partition Manager Personal(free), deleted my D: drive and then extended my C: drive to full size. It did the job before booting.

Thank you all for your help.

 

without risk,that would be the famous partition magic or easeus partition manager.you can have a try of its demo for free.