Windows 10: I have an internal 1T HDD storage drive that I want to merge with my C drive, however, it...

My 1T storage drive is in the Basic position. My C drive is labeled Disk-1. The healthy recovery partition also follows the C drive in the Disk Management screen.

:)

 

Internal Storage Devices swap drive letters

The machine has a M.2 PCLe NVMe SSD (the system drive), an internal HDD storage drive, and an internal optical drive
The SATA controller was set as RAID at the factory. I never enabled RAID on the system by any means to create RAID volumes.

The BIOS lets me change the SATA Controller to RAID or to AHCI.
I recently made the change from RAID to AHCI in the BIOS using safemode boot procedure steps.

Something I didn’t expect happening during this change was the internal optical Drive and the internal HDD swapping drive letters.
Maybe I’m being a little overly apprehensive. If the data can't be restored one day for whatever reason, would keeping the drive letters the way they are assigned now and making all new backups of personal data, and creating new DVD rescue disks, and new backup DVD’s be the more prudent step to ensure the data integrity for the lack of a better term ?

It's easy to reassign the drive letters following the excellent tutorial
“Change and Assign Drive Letter in Windows 10 by @Brink which offers a way for correcting this on-board SATA port redirection that maybe occurred or whatever, except.....
every DVD burned, every personal file ever backed up on the external drive using SyncBackFree, the rescue DVD, all originally created with the opposite drive letters, draws concern of potential file unrestorability, and DVD data unreliability.

I only mention my skepticism changing the drive letter of a storage device back to what it originally was and potentially not being able to restore back ups only because some have attested that trying to restore personal files to the internal HDD lead to headaches.

Any comments and suggestions are welcomed and appreciated.

Not to get off the subject but,
The Storage controller driver that installed is a Standard Microsoft NVMe driver. Any suggestions on this generic driver are also very much appreciated.

 

how to merge c drive and d drive

It depends on a couple things.

If you have two separate physical C and D drives, you can't merge them.

If the D drive is a partition (not a drive) and its to the right of C:\ in Disk Management, you can right click C:\ then click Extend.

Press Windows key + X

Click Disk Management

Take a screenshot then post in a reply here.

If the layout is similar to how I described it, try the following. Make sure important data is backed up if there is any.

Select the D:\ partition

Right click the ‘D:\’ in Disk Management, on the contextual menu, click the ‘Delete Volume’ option. Click ‘Yes’ when the warning dialog appears.

The Volume you deleted will now appear as ‘Free space’, you will also notice that the disk icon no longer appears in the list of volumes.

Right click the Free space partition, and click Delete, click Yes on the Disk Management warning that appears.

The volume will now appear as Unallocated. Our next step is to merge back that unallocated free space with the system partition (C:\). Right click the System volume and click the ‘Extend Volume’ option on the contextual menu, click ‘Yes’ when the warning appears.

A wizard will now begin that will guide through the steps to merge back the unallocated space with your system partition.

The wizard provides a simple procedure to merge back the unallocated space with the system drive. Once you have selected the space, click Next, at the end of the wizard, you will see the amount allocated.

 

OS drive merge with external drive

I read it as: You have two separate hard drives of 1T each.

1. I have 2 different hard drives of 1 TB each in my PC.

2. I want to merge both different drives to a single large portion of 2TB

You can NOT combine them to make ONE hard drive or partition of 2T if they are separate hard drives.

And IF they were two 1T partitions on a single 2T hard drive you can not merge those two partitions together if both 1T drives contain a separate operating system; unless you want to lose one operating system.