Windows 10: Wanting to use unallocated space on my hard drive, any dos and don'ts?

*Party Nothing like that feeling of seeing the data you thought was lost forever. I know how it feels to lose data. I had a drive crash in 2003 that I will never forget. Every picture, song, document, you name it... POOF GONE when a hard drive died. I keep a backup of all data now since that day. I felt like I had lost a child at the time *Roflmao2


EDIT: It was over 7 years of data I lost in that ^^

 

My C: partition gets low on free space. It's mostly filled with files that make up the games I play when looking on Windirstat. However, when I looked on disk management, I noticed that there's 99.9 GB of unallocated space on my hard drive plus a few smaller partitions. I knew 830 GB (the size of my C: partition) was a bit lacking considering I have a 1 TB hard drive but I didn't think about unused hard drive space until now. Here's a screenshot:



I think I should use up this unallocated space for my C: partition and I don't know if any of these smaller partitions are necessary to keep. I also don't want to erase anything on my hard drive by accident, but I have some experience with expanding and reducing partition space for adding new partitions on disk management. Are there any things to recommend on what I should and shouldn't do?

:)

 

Disk Management

Hi,

Unallocated space represents the space on your hard drive that has not been assigned a drive letter. Without allocation, you can't use the space on the drive.

Normally, deleting a partition will create a section of unallocated space on your drive. You may use the unallocated disk space as a recovery partition.
Recovery partition on the hard drive
can help you troubleshoot and fix problems with your PC. To use the unallocated space, you can either format the partition or extend another partition such as the Windows partition. You will need to use the Disk Management tool to do either of these things.
You may use this
article for your reference.

Let us know if you need further assistance.

 

Using unallocated space on W10 media creation flash drive

I have temporarily made my 128GB flash drive into a media creation tool to address some boot issues I was having. I know I will be needing a media creation USB in the future, so I wanted to keep that on the drive, but I wanted to use the unallocated space
left on the drive.

According to Disk Management, there is the 32GB FAT32 partition for the media creation, and 83.21GB left unallocated, but I cannot create a new volume with the unallocated space. Is there any way to use the unallocated space on this drive, or should I grab
a smaller USB for the media creation tool?

Thanks in advance.

 

Thats fairly simple you move c to the left so the free space is then after c once done you can then grow c I wouldnt both about the other small one leave them use Best Free Partition Manager for Windows | MiniTool Partition Free it makes the job simple

 

You can delete either 1 or 3 depending on where your recovery is currently used by Windows.
Delete 2 (D: drive) : only 99MB

To find out which Recovery partition is used: run from Admin command: reagentc /info

then merge 5,2, 1 or 3 into C. Final should look: Recovery, EFI System,MSR (hidden from DM) , C drive

NOTE: there's also a 16MB MSR partition which DM does not show

 

Doesn't W10 have a built-in tool (Storage Spaces) that allows users to combine multiple drives/partitions into a single storage pool?

 

How can I move C: to the left?

It says partition 1, so I should delete 3 as well, yet right clicking only gives me a help option. Also, how do I merge them?

 

Yes, only one Recovery partition is needed.
To delete partition 3, you'd need to use diskpart. Open Admin command prompt, type:
diskpart
select disk 0
list partition ====> This step to make sure that partition 3 is the one you want to delete.
select partition 3
delete partition override
exit

Use Partition Magic recommended in post #2 above.

WARNING: Always create a backup image of current Windows disk before any modification in case something goes wrong then you can roll back.

 

Well, I installed Partition Magic and used it to have C: use up the unallocated space. However, I ran into a wall when trying to merge the smaller partitions into C: as one of them are in the FAT32 file system. The problem is that I can't convert the FAT32 partition into an NTFS partition as it doesn't give me option for that, yet, it does give me the option to convert all the other partitions to convert from NTFS into FAT which I don't want to.

 

just delete the partition, it will become unallocated space then you can expand into it.

 

Partition Wizard is an excellent tool. I expect you have sorted out those recovery partitions. Note you can use Partition Wizard to peruse the contents of those hidden recovery partitions to work out which is the oldest for deletion. Also ensure you have a full system image backup before you start fiddling with system partitions.

 

Do you mean a system restore point? I don't know if I can backup 766 GB of data somewhere.

 

Here's a screenshot of Partition Wizard:

 

Until your prepared to back up your system and data, I would not mess with any partitions or any other disk operations you can easily lose or corrupt your data.