Windows 7 C: is full and D: is empty; Can you help?

Fred T

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Mar 7, 2011
My wife's relatively new Dell Studio 1569 is showing 2 drive letters. C & D. It has one 500GB hard drive that apparently arrived with a partition. C: drive has an allocation of only 58.5 GB and D: drive is showing 397GB. The C: drive is listed as OS and the D drive is listed as Local Disk. The C: drive has everthing in it from the Dell Folders to the Windows folder. It also contains the Program and Users files. Meanwhile, the D drive sits idle and recieves no data, file or programs. The problem is the C: drive (being the smaller of the 2) is almost full (10 gigs remaining) and D: drive is freed up. What solution could benefit me? And how can I accomplish it. Thanks to all who offer their time and expertise on this forum.
 
It sounds like it was partitioned for storage which is unusual to come that way. Did you look on Dell's website? Is there anything visible on the D drive? Look in disk manager and see what it says there. I partitioned my drive and in Disk Management The C is Primary partition and the other D is Logical that's where I store all of my data. C is simply the OS and software. If the D is free space you can store data there and reload the system without having to reload all of your saved data. See if there is a hidden recovery partition also.
Joe
 
As was mentioned, it is very important you are sure which partition is which. It sounds like you know that the C: drive is listed as System, Boot, Active, you will probably be ok, but if you want, you can take a snipping tool picture of Disk Management and post it using the paperclip. Edit out any info you may not want to show.

But if it is like you believe, you can expand the size of the C: partition using Disk Management. It is fairly easy to enlarge, but not as easy to shrink. You will probably have to shrink the D: drive so as to leave room for the C: expansion. If there is nothing on the D: partition, you might just delete it until you get C: set. But Dell will sometimes put a recovery partition, so as suggested, make sure you know where that is, if it has one.

There are different opinions on where certain types of data are stored, but since I like to image my system so I can recover it completely, I leave most of my stuff on the primary partition.
 
[I imagined that the configuration was for D: to be my recovery disk but C: should have been the Local disk. My problem is my wife is running out of space on the C: drive. Growing C: and shrinking D: sounds like a solution. Can you provide me with details on how to perform this operation. What are the risks? I have attached screen shots of the computer and the two allocations. My thanx to Joe and Saltgrass. ATTACH]12046[/ATTACH]
 

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You might start by typing diskmgmt.msc in the search window in the Start Menu. That will open Disk Management. This is the place to look at your drives to see what might be going on.

To expand a partition, you have to be able to provide free space adjacent to it. If Disk Management shows the partitions side by side, then you need to release some adjacent to C: Sometimes, the leading edge of D: will not be moveable because of data in that part. If you have nothing in D: or can store it somewhere, then delete that partition and right click C: and select "Extend Volume".

Decide how large you want it then complete the process. You can then reformat the unallocated space as D:

Extending partitions is not normally a problem, but a suggestion to back up your data is always necessary.

I have included a picture of my drive for you inspection. I have the small partition Win 7 uses for certain purposes.
 

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you could try to shrink drive D and get some unallocated space, then add the space into C drive, you can not do this under the built-in disk management, because you can only extend the C drive when there's an unalloacted space behind it, but you can not move the unallocated space behind it. You could try to use other Link Removed - Invalid URL, such as Partition Magic, Partition Assistant, either of them are work a perfect job on manageing HDD.
 
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