Remove virtual drive

[Tony UK]

I have a Sony Vaio laptop with Vista Home + SP1. It came with just a C drive.
I decided to create a second D drive so that the operational side would be on
C drive and data would be on D drive. The intention was to create a situation
where, if I had to use the recovery disk, it could just replace C drive with
the factory settings, while leaving data in place on D.

But now I want to remove the separate drive D and restore the space to drive
C. I have backed up everything in drive D to external media. However,
whatever I do, I cannot find a way to simply dump drive D and have the space
reallocated to drive C. THe system will let me create additonal drives, and
shrink drives, but not just reallocate them to C drive. Of course, if all
else fails, I can restore all my data to drive D, but for reasons associated
with the use of an iPod I want the maximum space available in C drive to cope
with this. But I can find no way to do this.

I would be most grateful if someone could point me in the right direction. I
must be missing something very simple, but I can't find the way simply to
reverse the process that created the additional D drive in the first place.

 

[Steve McGarrett]

I have a Sony Vaio laptop with Vista Home + SP1. It came with just a C drive.
I decided to create a second D drive so that the operational side would be on
C drive and data would be on D drive. The intention was to create a situation
where, if I had to use the recovery disk, it could just replace C drive with
the factory settings, while leaving data in place on D.

Good idea... but bad assumption. The recovery disc will put
everything back to out-of-the-box condition, and that condition did
NOT have a D drive from what you say.

But now I want to remove the separate drive D and restore the space to drive
C. I have backed up everything in drive D to external media. However,
whatever I do, I cannot find a way to simply dump drive D and have the space
reallocated to drive C.

Go into Disk Management. Delete D. Resize C to fill the void.

 

[Dave]

It sounds like you created a partition on your drive, and named it D:.

If you wish to remove it, you can using Disk Manager.
Start - Control Panel - Administrative tools - Computer management - Disk
Management
right-click on D: and select Delete Volume

after removing it, you should be able to extend C:, provided that the free
space is following C: (to the right).

Make sure you delete the correct volume.

For a tutorial, look at
http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/95418-disk-management-delete-extend.html

 

[R. C. White]

Hi, Tony.

You don't have a "virtual drive". You have a second partition on your
physical hard disk drive.

What software did you use to create your Drive D:? You did not mention Disk
Management, the built-in utility that Microsoft includes in Vista for this
job. If you haven't yet found Disk Management, just click Start and type
"diskmgmt.msc" and press Enter.

Steve and Dave already gave you instructions for using Disk Management to
delete your Drive D: partition and expand your Drive C: to include the
newly-unallocated space.

But exactly how did you create Drive D: in the first place. Typically, a
new computer is delivered with all the space on the HDD dedicated to the
single partition, Drive C:. To have any unallocated space available for
allocation to a new drive, you would normally need to first shrink Drive C:,
using either Disk Management or a third-party utility. Since you don't seem
to be familiar with Disk Management, please tell us how you created Drive
D:. It might change our advice as to how you should proceed.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
Windows Live Mail 2009 (14.0.8064.0206) in Win7 Ultimate x64 7000

 

[Tony UK]

Dave: Wow, how quick was that?!! I went to the tutorial you mentioned, it all
worked out the way it should, I now have one C drive, with full space, and I
will reinstall all my data. I have been using this newsgroup for years and
the XP group before that, but this is the quickest, most effective response I
have ever had. I was sitting over a gloomy situation and really not wanting
to do a clean wipe of the whole system and you came up with the right answer.
So, thank you so much for saving me days of work and reconstruction.