shrinking or removing volumes

Running win 7 pro. A few yrs ago I took a 160gig hdd and split it into 5
smaller drives so I could better organize different things. music into
one pics into another and so on. Now I want to create one out of five
again. I have several external drives and want to format and simply use
one drive instead of the five I created. Can I do this using win 7 or do
I need another program?

Hi, Drew.

Running win 7 pro. A few yrs ago I took a 160gig hdd and split it into 5
smaller drives so I could better organize different things. music into one
pics into another and so on. Now I want to create one out of five again. I
have several external drives and want to format and simply use one drive
instead of the five I created. Can I do this using win 7 or do I need
another program?

No, you don't need more software. Disk Management can handle the job
nicely.

You can choose from several ways to attack the project. A few years ago,
160 GB was a large HDD; now much larger ones are common. You did not say
how large your external HDDs are.

If at least on of your externals is at least as big as the actual contents
of your 5 drives, the job can be quite quick and easy. Just use Disk
Management to format that external disk as a single partition, which I'll
call Drive X:. Then copy the entire contents of each of your 5 drives into
Drive X:. Then, if you want everything back on your original disk, use DM
to reformat it as a single partition. Then just copy everything to it from
Drive X:. Done. ;)

If you have no single HDD large enough to hold all your data, you can use as
many as required to safely store your files temporarily until you've
reformatted your internal drive, then move it all back to your new larger
partition. You might have to do the job in stages, depending on how much
space you have available outside the partitions you want to combine into
one.

You might want to invest some time in working out the organization of your
new large partition: Everything in a single folder, or a hierarchical
arrangement of folders and files. (Maybe one folder for each of your
current 5 drives.) I'll leave that for a future project. ;)

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX

Microsoft Windows MVP (2002-2010)
Windows Live Mail 2012 (Build 16.4.3528.0331) in Win8.1 Pro with Media
Center

On Wed, 24 Sep 2014 21:26:34 -0500, R. C. White wrote:

If at least on of your externals is at least as big as the actual contents
of your 5 drives, the job can be quite quick and easy. Just use Disk
Management to format that external disk as a single partition, which I'll
call Drive X:. Then copy the entire contents of each of your 5 drives into
Drive X:. Then, if you want everything back on your original disk, use DM
to reformat it as a single partition. Then just copy everything to it from
Drive X:. Done. ;)

Maybe...

Is one of the partitions on the 160 GB drive the boot drive? I mean will
that be the drive that becomes C:? I guess it might be called the System
Drive these days...

At the root level of each partition, is there a folder (or several) of
the same name (or names) on at least two different partitions?

Both of these things would require some attention.

--
Gene E. Bloch (Stumbling Bloch)

Drew wrote:
Running win 7 pro. A few yrs ago I took a 160gig hdd and split it into 5
smaller drives so I could better organize different things. music into
one pics into another and so on. Now I want to create one out of five
again. I have several external drives and want to format and simply use
one drive instead of the five I created. Can I do this using win 7 or do
I need another program?

Your computer has room for physical hard drives.

The hard drives can have the space allocated on the
drive, using Disk Management. You can prepare a drive,
such that a single partition takes up the entire drive,
so there is no requirement to use multiple partitions.

So the partition is a level of disk space allocation, a way
of organizing things. Your C: is your OS partition
(typically), as an existing example.

You can have up to four Primary partitions (suited to OS
installation or general data storage). If you need more
partitions than that, make the last partition Extended,
and it can be chopped up into Logical partitions. You
can have a lot more partitions on a single hard drive that way.

Inside a partition, you can have a hierarchy of folders,
and they can be created in File Explorer using "New folder"
etc.

Hard drive --- Partition F:
Partition G:
Partition H:
Partition X: ---- Folder Music
Folder Pics

And Disk Management also supports removing partitions.
You can

1) Prepare a new hard drive.
2) Create as many partitions as you want
3) Copy the folders from the old arrangement, to the newly
setup hard drive, its one or more partitions, its folder
structure that you've set up.
4) Remove the partitions on the original drive using
Disk Management, in preparation for reusing the
original drive.

With an extra (spare) hard drive, it makes rearranging
your data easy. It's also possible to modify partitions
on a single drive (with no spare drive), using a Partition
Manager program and selecting the "Merge" function. Windows
doesn't have "Merge" built in, and there is a level of
danger involved with Merge. But Merge would be
a way to convert two partitions (sitting next to one
another on the same drive), into one larger partition.

It's just a lot safer to use an extra, physical hard drive,
to aid your rearrangement efforts. And Disk Management built-in
(diskmgmt.msc) has you covered.

Paul

On 09/24/2014 09:39 PM, Drew wrote:
Running win 7 pro. A few yrs ago I took a 160gig hdd and split it into 5
smaller drives so I could better organize different things. music into
one pics into another and so on. Now I want to create one out of five
again. I have several external drives and want to format and simply use
one drive instead of the five I created. Can I do this using win 7 or do
I need another program?

You don't say where the OS is. If it's not on the drive, and you can
copy things off even temporarily, then just format it.

If the OS is on the drive, copy all the extra 4 partitions to externals.
In Drive Manager you can select one of the 4 and remove the partition.
That space will become unallocated. Then repeat for the other 3.
When all 4 are unallocated you'll wind up with your OS partition and 1
large unallocated space. Just use DM to extend the C: drive. You'll
now have the full drive on C:

On Wed, 24 Sep 2014 18:39:57 -0700, Drew
wrote:

Running win 7 pro. A few yrs ago I took a 160gig hdd and split it into 5
smaller drives so I could better organize different things. music into
one pics into another and so on.


Many people think that having such multiple partitions is a technique
for better organization, but I completely disagree. In fact, it often
leads to *poorer* organization. Yes, separating different kinds of
files on partitions is an organizational technique, but so is
separating different kinds of files in folders. The difference is that
partitions are static and fixed in size, while folders are dynamic,
changing size automatically as necessary to meet your changing needs.
That generally makes folders a much better way to organize, in my
view.

True, partitions can be resized when necessary, but in many cases
doing so requires third-party software . Such third-party software
normally costs money, and, no matter how good and how stable it is,
affects the entire drive, entailing a risk of losing everything. Plan
your partitions well in the first place, and no repartitioning should
be necessary. The need to repartition usually comes about as a result
of over-partitioning in the first place.

What frequently happens when people organize with partitions instead
of folders is that they miscalculate how much room they need on each
such partition, and then when they run out of room on the partition
where a file logically belongs, while still having lots of space left
on the other, they simply store the file in the "wrong" partition.
Paradoxically, therefore, that kind of partition structure results in
less organization rather than more.



Now I want to create one out of five
again.


Good. Five partitions is *way* too many for almost everyone.


I have several external drives and want to format and simply use
one drive instead of the five I created. Can I do this using win 7 or do
I need another program?


Sorry, but I'm somewhat confused by that paragraph. Above you say you
split your 160GB drive into five partitions. Here you talk about
several external drives. Which is it--one 160GB internal drive or
several external drives?

Repartitioning the external drives should be easy, but if your only
internal drive is split into five partitions, you probably need
third-party software to do this.

On Thu, 25 Sep 2014 10:49:06 -0700, Ken Blake wrote:

Many people think that having such multiple partitions is a technique
for better organization, but I completely disagree. In fact, it often
leads to *poorer* organization. Yes, separating different kinds of
files on partitions is an organizational technique, but so is
separating different kinds of files in folders.

I used to divide into partitions as well. Until a poster told me using
folders was (is) a better alternative. Since then I've used folder and I
can not see the purpose of dividing into 5 (five?) partitions. And if
I'm not mistaken you can assign a drive to folders if you want.

--
s|b

In article ,
lid says...

On Wed, 24 Sep 2014 18:39:57 -0700, Drew
wrote:

Running win 7 pro. A few yrs ago I took a 160gig hdd and split it into 5
smaller drives so I could better organize different things. music into
one pics into another and so on.


Many people think that having such multiple partitions is a technique
for better organization, but I completely disagree. In fact, it often
leads to *poorer* organization. Yes, separating different kinds of
files on partitions is an organizational technique, but so is
separating different kinds of files in folders. The difference is that
partitions are static and fixed in size, while folders are dynamic,
changing size automatically as necessary to meet your changing needs.
That generally makes folders a much better way to organize, in my
view.

True, partitions can be resized when necessary, but in many cases
doing so requires third-party software . Such third-party software
normally costs money, and, no matter how good and how stable it is,
affects the entire drive, entailing a risk of losing everything. Plan
your partitions well in the first place, and no repartitioning should
be necessary. The need to repartition usually comes about as a result
of over-partitioning in the first place.

What frequently happens when people organize with partitions instead
of folders is that they miscalculate how much room they need on each
such partition, and then when they run out of room on the partition
where a file logically belongs, while still having lots of space left
on the other, they simply store the file in the "wrong" partition.
Paradoxically, therefore, that kind of partition structure results in
less organization rather than more.



Now I want to create one out of five
again.


Good. Five partitions is *way* too many for almost everyone.


I have several external drives and want to format and simply use
one drive instead of the five I created. Can I do this using win 7 or do
I need another program?


Sorry, but I'm somewhat confused by that paragraph. Above you say you

Using multi partitions made sense when pc's wouldn't neccessarily be
able to otherwise access the full capacity of the drive because of Bios
limitations but that was decades ago now it seems. I even remember a
time when one had to load a device driver to access all the hard disk.

I agree, organizing using folders makes as much sense as organizing
using partitions and with less restrictions.

There's a false sense of security using partitions. Gives one a feeling
that if partition 1 goes bad partiton 2 will still be ok. That's
nonsense as it's much more likely the entire disk is bad and even if one
can access partition 2 you certainly can't trust it when part of disk
has already failed.

On 9/25/2014 1:49 PM, Ken Blake wrote:
Many people think that having such multiple partitions is a technique
for better organization, but I completely disagree. In fact, it often
leads to*poorer* organization. Yes, separating different kinds of
files on partitions is an organizational technique, but so is
separating different kinds of files in folders. The difference is that
partitions are static and fixed in size, while folders are dynamic,
changing size automatically as necessary to meet your changing needs.
That generally makes folders a much better way to organize, in my
view.

One of the advantages of having all of your data files in one folder is
backing up your data.

Because "that's the way I always did it" I have been putting my pictures
in a primary folder on the C: drive. They are neatly organized by date.
I put all of my other data files into the My Documents folder in
appropriate folders.

When it comes to backing up or syncing my data, it is much easier to
back up My Documents and get every thing in one operation, than it is to
have different back up profiles, one for g: one for pictures, on for My
Documents, etc. and have to run each one to get a total back up of the
physical drive.

On 9/25/14 11:49 AM, Ken Blake wrote:
On Wed, 24 Sep 2014 18:39:57 -0700, Drew
wrote:

Running win 7 pro. A few yrs ago I took a 160gig hdd and split it into 5
smaller drives so I could better organize different things. music into
one pics into another and so on.


Many people think that having such multiple partitions is a technique
for better organization, but I completely disagree. In fact, it often
leads to *poorer* organization. Yes, separating different kinds of
files on partitions is an organizational technique, but so is
separating different kinds of files in folders. The difference is that
partitions are static and fixed in size, while folders are dynamic,
changing size automatically as necessary to meet your changing needs.
That generally makes folders a much better way to organize, in my
view.

I do a bit of both. For the computers that have a singe large
partition, I create a small partition for the OS, and a data partition.
Occasionally, like on this Mac, I create a 2nd OS partition where I
have the same OS installed. I use it for troubleshooting issues I can't
find the solution for (which I've almost never had to do).

Then I store every single bit of my data on the Data partition, and use
folders there.

What we often do forget or fail to mention, even a single hard drive
eventually gets full. No partitioning or folder scheme solves that. LOL

True, partitions can be resized when necessary, but in many cases
doing so requires third-party software . Such third-party software
normally costs money, and, no matter how good and how stable it is,
affects the entire drive, entailing a risk of losing everything. Plan
your partitions well in the first place, and no repartitioning should
be necessary. The need to repartition usually comes about as a result
of over-partitioning in the first place.

What frequently happens when people organize with partitions instead
of folders is that they miscalculate how much room they need on each
such partition, and then when they run out of room on the partition
where a file logically belongs, while still having lots of space left
on the other, they simply store the file in the "wrong" partition.
Paradoxically, therefore, that kind of partition structure results in
less organization rather than more.



Now I want to create one out of five
again.


Good. Five partitions is *way* too many for almost everyone.


I have several external drives and want to format and simply use
one drive instead of the five I created. Can I do this using win 7 or do
I need another program?


Sorry, but I'm somewhat confused by that paragraph. Above you say you
split your 160GB drive into five partitions. Here you talk about
several external drives. Which is it--one 160GB internal drive or
several external drives?

Repartitioning the external drives should be easy, but if your only
internal drive is split into five partitions, you probably need
third-party software to do this.

You can use Disk Management to do this, I think someone in this thread
has already mentioned the basics of how to do it. I hope anyone that
follows the suggestion copies their info from the partition first. :-)


--
Ken
Mac OS X 10.8.5
Firefox 25.0
Thunderbird 24.6.0
"My brain is like lightning, a quick flash
and it's gone!"

On 9/25/14 12:57 PM, Keith Nuttle wrote:
On 9/25/2014 1:49 PM, Ken Blake wrote:
Many people think that having such multiple partitions is a technique
for better organization, but I completely disagree. In fact, it often
leads to*poorer* organization. Yes, separating different kinds of
files on partitions is an organizational technique, but so is
separating different kinds of files in folders. The difference is that
partitions are static and fixed in size, while folders are dynamic,
changing size automatically as necessary to meet your changing needs.
That generally makes folders a much better way to organize, in my
view.

One of the advantages of having all of your data files in one folder is
backing up your data.

Because "that's the way I always did it" I have been putting my pictures
in a primary folder on the C: drive. They are neatly organized by date.
I put all of my other data files into the My Documents folder in
appropriate folders.

When it comes to backing up or syncing my data, it is much easier to
back up My Documents and get every thing in one operation, than it is to
have different back up profiles, one for g: one for pictures, on for My
Documents, etc. and have to run each one to get a total back up of the
physical drive.

Hi, Keith,

I'm just curious, have you ever considered creating a partition
dedicated to your data, and then relocating your My Documents, My
Pictures, My Bathroom (----- checking to see if people are reading with
comprehension! LOL), etc to the data partition.

There are valid reasons for doing this, to which even MS has admitted
too, after a number of years.


--
Ken
Mac OS X 10.8.5
Firefox 25.0
Thunderbird 24.6.0
"My brain is like lightning, a quick flash
and it's gone!"

On 9/25/2014 3:11 PM, Ken Springer wrote:
On 9/25/14 12:57 PM, Keith Nuttle wrote:
On 9/25/2014 1:49 PM, Ken Blake wrote:
Many people think that having such multiple partitions is a technique
for better organization, but I completely disagree. In fact, it often
leads to*poorer* organization. Yes, separating different kinds of
files on partitions is an organizational technique, but so is
separating different kinds of files in folders. The difference is that
partitions are static and fixed in size, while folders are dynamic,
changing size automatically as necessary to meet your changing needs.
That generally makes folders a much better way to organize, in my
view.

One of the advantages of having all of your data files in one folder is
backing up your data.

Because "that's the way I always did it" I have been putting my pictures
in a primary folder on the C: drive. They are neatly organized by date.
I put all of my other data files into the My Documents folder in
appropriate folders.

When it comes to backing up or syncing my data, it is much easier to
back up My Documents and get every thing in one operation, than it is to
have different back up profiles, one for g: one for pictures, on for My
Documents, etc. and have to run each one to get a total back up of the
physical drive.

Hi, Keith,

I'm just curious, have you ever considered creating a partition
dedicated to your data, and then relocating your My Documents, My
Pictures, My Bathroom (----- checking to see if people are reading with
comprehension! LOL), etc to the data partition.

There are valid reasons for doing this, to which even MS has admitted
too, after a number of years.


Over the years and several new computers I have considered it, but for
many reasons have not acted on the thought.


I understand the advantages of having the OS isolated from the Data
files, but it creates problems for some programs. Having the data in
some place on another disk or folder that the program does not recognize
will sometime confuse the program and cause problems

I away came to the conclusion that it was not worth the trouble

On 9/25/14 2:06 PM, Keith Nuttle wrote:
On 9/25/2014 3:11 PM, Ken Springer wrote:
On 9/25/14 12:57 PM, Keith Nuttle wrote:
On 9/25/2014 1:49 PM, Ken Blake wrote:
Many people think that having such multiple partitions is a technique
for better organization, but I completely disagree. In fact, it often
leads to*poorer* organization. Yes, separating different kinds of
files on partitions is an organizational technique, but so is
separating different kinds of files in folders. The difference is that
partitions are static and fixed in size, while folders are dynamic,
changing size automatically as necessary to meet your changing needs.
That generally makes folders a much better way to organize, in my
view.

One of the advantages of having all of your data files in one folder is
backing up your data.

Because "that's the way I always did it" I have been putting my pictures
in a primary folder on the C: drive. They are neatly organized by date.
I put all of my other data files into the My Documents folder in
appropriate folders.

When it comes to backing up or syncing my data, it is much easier to
back up My Documents and get every thing in one operation, than it is to
have different back up profiles, one for g: one for pictures, on for My
Documents, etc. and have to run each one to get a total back up of the
physical drive.

Hi, Keith,

I'm just curious, have you ever considered creating a partition
dedicated to your data, and then relocating your My Documents, My
Pictures, My Bathroom (----- checking to see if people are reading with
comprehension! LOL), etc to the data partition.

There are valid reasons for doing this, to which even MS has admitted
too, after a number of years.


Over the years and several new computers I have considered it, but for
many reasons have not acted on the thought.


I understand the advantages of having the OS isolated from the Data
files, but it creates problems for some programs. Having the data in
some place on another disk or folder that the program does not recognize
will sometime confuse the program and cause problems

Is that with older software? I've seen others mention this, but I've
never encountered it.

I away came to the conclusion that it was not worth the trouble



--
Ken
Mac OS X 10.8.5
Firefox 25.0
Thunderbird 24.6.0
"My brain is like lightning, a quick flash
and it's gone!"

On Thu, 25 Sep 2014 16:06:58 -0400, Keith Nuttle
wrote:

I understand the advantages of having the OS isolated from the Data
files,


As far as I'm concerned, the only advantage of doing that is if you
back up only your data. If you back up data *and* Windows and it its
programs, for example, by doing an image. to me there's no advantage
at all.


but it creates problems for some programs.


What programs do you have in mind? I've never seen any that had such a
problem.



Having the data in
some place on another disk or folder that the program does not recognize
will sometime confuse the program and cause problems


Not in my experience it doesn't. My data is on a physical drive (not
just a partition) on a separate drive, and, as I said, I've never seen
such a problem.

On Thu, 25 Sep 2014 13:05:28 -0600, Ken Springer
wrote:


Repartitioning the external drives should be easy, but if your only
internal drive is split into five partitions, you probably need
third-party software to do this.

You can use Disk Management to do this, I think someone in this thread
has already mentioned the basics of how to do it.


Yes, you *can* do it. I shouldn't have said "need," and should have
said third-party software can make it easier.


I hope anyone that
follows the suggestion copies their info from the partition first. :-)


I strongly agree!