I recently had a hard drive failure, and had a local repair shop install a new 2TB hard drive. The machine is an HP Pro running Windows 10 Pro.
The way the new drive was partitioned, about half of the 2 TB is the “C” drive with the operating system, programs, data, etc. The other half is drive “I”, labeled as “New Volume” and is empty. What I want to do is merge these two partitions into one “C” drive.
I have attempted to use third party drive partitioning software programs that supposedly can merge the two partitions, except for one thing: between these two partitions there is a 100mb EFI system partition, as well as a 15gb “Recovery” partition, and a 16mb “Reserved” partition. The third party software I have tried will only merge two adjacent partitions, despite some of their claims that they can merge non-adjacent partitions.
If I attempt to delete the EFI system partition, or move it, I get an error message that doing so will cause my PC to become unbootable. Either that or, depending on the software used, the options to merge the partitions is greyed out.
So is it possible to do what I want without wiping the drive and reformatting? I’m not going to wipe and reformat, I would rather just leave it the way it is.
Programs that I have tried: AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard addition; Mini Tool Partition Wizard 10; and EaseUS Partition Master.
Is the disk using GPT partitions? If so, you could use AOMEI Partition Assistant to convert it to an MBR disk, which doesn’t require the EFI partition. Note that 2 TB is the largest size a bootable MBR disk can have; larger disks can be MBR, but they can’t be system disks.
Well, that was bad design. Those special partitions should be at either the front of back of the drive, specifically to avoid this sort of situation.
Since one of your partitions is empty, I’d just delete that one entirely, and see if you can move the special partitions all to the other side. After you do that, just expand the boot partition to fill up the rest of the space.
That said, I’ve never moved those partitions on my computer. They were at the front of the drive, where they should be. I don’t know if there’s a special concern in moving those. So look into that before trying anything I said, to make sure the EFI partition will still work if it’s moved.
Yes, I am able to use the software programs to move things around and accomplish what you suggest. These programs allow you to make changes and see the results before you apply them. However I have not applied them because I am afraid that moving the EFI partition might cause a problem. I can copy the EFI partition to the end of the drive, but when I go to delete the original, I get the error message about doing so making the PC unbootable. But if it’s still there, just moved to the end, I’m wondering if that would be acceptable.
To ricksummon, yes the drive is GPT. I don’t see any options in any of these third party programs to convert from GPT to MBR. Maybe it’s because I have the free versions. From what I have read, doing so only works on drives with nothing on them.
Sort of. I’m guessing that your real objection is not to wiping and reformatting itself, but having to reinstall all your programs and data. And there is a way around that. AOMEI Backupper (free) will automatically copy your EFI and recovery partitions during a system backup, and will restore them in the correct order. For safety, you would want to do the restore to a different physical drive, and test it, before reformatting your original drive and restoring to it. When you boot the restored image, all your programs and data should be just like before.
For future reference, if you keep your system partition small (mine is 60GB with over half of it empty), and put your programs and data in a different partition (some programs insist on going onto the C: drive, but most allow you to specify a different location), then you can backup or restore a Windows 10 partition in two or three minutes, assuming you have a second physical drive for the image. And the image file is only 8-10GB, because Backupper skips unnecessary files like the hiberfile and paging file, skips empty sectors, and compresses the rest.
My first physical drive is 2TB. About half is “C” which contains operating system, data, programs, etc.
In the middle, I have “Recovery” 15.5gb; “EFI System” 100mb; and “Other” (reserved)" 16mb. Then, the other half of the physical drive is “Volume I” which has nothing on it. No drive letters assigned to any of the three middle partitions.
Using AOMEI Partition Assistant, I was able to first delete Volume “I”, and then move “Recovery”, “EFI System”, and “Other” to the end of this free space, and then merge the old “I” space with the “C” partition, which is what I wanted.
AOMEI lets you see what the changes will do before you apply them. I did not apply anything yet.
The big question: will my PC still boot correctly if I move the three mentioned partitions to the end of the drive instead of leaving them where they were? They’re all still there, just moved.
It should, but you would be insane to not make a backup of your system drive before you try it. If you have a second physical drive to put the backup on, which your first sentence implies, it should go pretty quickly, and you don’t have to stop using your C: drive while you do it, although I wouldn’t do anything too CPU or disk intensive. But web surfing and email should be fine.
If it turns out it doesn’t work, then you’re free to reformat your original drive and restore the backup image to it, at which point your unlettered partitions should be where they belong.
Good call. As I said, I’ve had good results with AOMEI’s free Backupper, and it has features not normally in free software, such as the ability to restore to a smaller partition than the backup was from. And it’s unbelievably fast – two minutes for my system partition.
If you use it to restore your image, be sure and check the box that says to align the partitions for SSDs, even if you don’t have an SSD. It will ensure everything is on a 4K boundary.
I’ve also heard good things about the EaseUS free utilities, and I’ve been using their partition manager since AOMEI’s started hanging on my system for some reason.
When installing Windows on an empty drive, Microsoft puts them at the beginning. Although they can evidently work elsewhere, if a future Windows update expects them to be at the beginning, the fact that they are not could bite you. Over the years, I’ve had Microsoft trash my drives during an update or install a couple of times, which is why I now make sure that my system drive is backed up, and all other drives are disconnected, whenever I do an install or major upgrade.
Finally applied the changes. It works! Everything good so far.
I did notice it assigned a drive letter to the 15.5gb “Recovery” partition, where as before it had no drive letter, and was not visible under “This PC”.
Yeah, something changed within the last year, because that never used to happen, but now I get it every time during a restore. You should remove that drive letter, even if you’re the only one who uses your PC, to prevent accidents. You will likely find that Windows Disk Management, and even graphical 3rd party partition managers like AOMEI or EaseUS, will not be able to remove the letter, but a command line utility like diskpart will. You can find the command sequence here: