Windows 10: unallocated partition

Not often I look in disk management, but now I see that I have an unallocated partition on my SSD.
I am certain that in the past there was not such a thing.
My question is what might be a possible reason that such a partition develops?

:)

 

Unallocated Partition

I have a 16mb unallocated partition on my system drive. I want to merge it to the main (C drive but the merge option is not available in the right-click menu. The drop down menu only shows "new simple volume." How do I merge this space to the main drive?

 

Unallocated Partition

Hello Matthew,

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If you have any other questions or concerns, feel free to share them with us here. Your input is very much welcome in our Community.

 

Can you post a screen shot of your disk management window.

 

The whole window please.

 

It looks like it used to be a manufacturer's recovery partition at one time. It could also have been left unallocated for overprovisioning and when you did a Windows upgrade, the upgrade process stuck a new recovery partition at the end of the drive. I would delete the first recovery partition, then expand C: drive into the resulting consolidated free space, then if needed fix the Windows recovery environment with the reagentc /setreimage command.

 

Is there a tutorial on how to do this?

 

@miata54

Real easy. Once you have the unallocated space available, right click the partition you want to expand, and click Extend Volume. Choose all available space it says you can. Apply.

 

Easy indeed.

Thanks

 

You're welcome. Not sure there is a formal tutorial for that. Probably is. TF has a tutorial for everything under the sun! Written by very sharp people.

 

I recommend for less experienced users to use MiniTool Partition Wizard Free:
MiniTool Free Partition Manager for Window 8/7/vista/xp | Partition Wizard Free Edition

The reason is that it will let you delete, move and expand partitions in ways that Windows either won't do, or will complain about doing. You would right click on the recovery partition to the right of your C: drive partition and delete it. Then resize the C: drive partition to fill all the empty space that gets created next to it. Don't forget to click apply in Partition Manager.

After that, restart the computer. Then open a Command Prompt (admin) or Powershell (Admin) and run the command:
reagentc /info

that will tell us if you need to reset your Advanced Recovery options menu. Even if we can't reset it, there is very little that you lose, everything on that menu (you get that menu holding down shift when you click on restart on the power button icon) can also be found by booting from a Windows 10 installation USB flash drive or DVD.

 

+1 for NavyLCDR advice above. I can recommend MiniTool Partition Wizard free which also lets you peruse the contents of hidden partitions.

 

I agree, MiniTool is an excellent partition manager and manipulator and exploring tool. It can do many, many things. In this particular case, all the OP needs to do is extend the volume, and the native Windows Disk Management is quick, easy, doesn't involve downloading, installing, and learning a new app just to do that. But, Minitool is great as a deeper tech tool.

 

Using disk management, where would the OP extend the C: drive volume to? There is a recovery partition directly to the right of it in the way.