Extending Basic Volume....Help Requested

[Sid Joyner]

This would seem like it should be so simple to do, but I have yet to figure
out how to do it.

I just purchased a Thinkpad R51 laptop that was a student laptop configured
for university use. It's has a 40 GB hard drive, which was partitioned into
two parts: 14 GB Basic partition (C: drive with the XP OS) and a 24 GB
partition (D: drive with university stuff on it). Maybe I acted too rash,
but I went into the administrative tools and deleted the partitioned D:
drive and it now shows up as contiguous unallocated space. I expected I
would be able to use XP admin tools to just extend the C: drive into the
unallocated space making one partition over the whole drive. However, when I
used the command utility diskpart to select the volume and then use the
extend command, the operarion fails with:

Diskpart failed to extend the volume. Please make sure the volume is valid
for extending.

Upon further research it appears I can't use the diskpart tool to extend a
system or boot volume. Isn't there an easy way (or at this point even a
difficult way) to accomplish this? I just want one basic partition allocated
over all the space on the disk that I can label as C: with documents,
programs, and OS. (I only have 300MB left on C - running out of space fast.)

Thanks for any assistance with this.

 

[Leonard Grey]

Sid:

"Easy" is a matter of opinion. You have two alternatives:

1 - Clean install of XP, creating one partition that fills the drive; or

2 - Third-party partitioning software (Acronis Disk Director and
Symantec Partition Magic are popular) to extend the C: partition.

If I may, ahem, provide my unsolicited opinion: Two partitions can be a
convenient setup. Your C: drive is for your system software (Windows and
programs) and your D: is for your data (My Documents). This is a handy
setup because it allows you to backup and restore your system
independently from your data. 14GB is a perfectly good, even generous,
size for your system. Cost to you = zero. Time to accomplish = 5
minutes. Riskiness = high (if you let me come over there and do it) or
low (if you do it yourself).

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

This would seem like it should be so simple to do, but I have yet to figure
out how to do it.

I just purchased a Thinkpad R51 laptop that was a student laptop configured
for university use. It's has a 40 GB hard drive, which was partitioned into
two parts: 14 GB Basic partition (C: drive with the XP OS) and a 24 GB
partition (D: drive with university stuff on it). Maybe I acted too rash,
but I went into the administrative tools and deleted the partitioned D:
drive and it now shows up as contiguous unallocated space. I expected I
would be able to use XP admin tools to just extend the C: drive into the
unallocated space making one partition over the whole drive. However, when I
used the command utility diskpart to select the volume and then use the
extend command, the operarion fails with:

Diskpart failed to extend the volume. Please make sure the volume is valid
for extending.

Upon further research it appears I can't use the diskpart tool to extend a
system or boot volume. Isn't there an easy way (or at this point even a
difficult way) to accomplish this? I just want one basic partition allocated
over all the space on the disk that I can label as C: with documents,
programs, and OS. (I only have 300MB left on C - running out of space fast.)

Thanks for any assistance with this.

If I bought a used computer, the first thing I would do with it would
be to reinstall the operating system cleanly. You have no idea how the
computer has been maintained, what has been installed incorrectly,
what is missing, what viruses and spyware there may be, etc. I
wouldn't want to live with somebody else's mistakes and problems,
possibility of kiddie porn, etc., and I wouldn't recommend that anyone
else do either.