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Can you unpartition a hard drive?

Luigi Oppido
Computer & Tech Specialist
Luigi Oppido is the Owner and Operator of Pleasure Point Computers in Santa Cruz, California. Luigi has over 25 years of experience in general computer repair, data recovery, virus removal, and upgrades. He is also the host of the Computer Man Show! broadcasted on KSQD covering central California for over two years.

Luigi Oppido

Computer & Tech Specialist

Expert Answer

You can delete them, but unless you're totally sure you know what you're doing, I wouldn't recommend it. On Windows 8 and 10, there are a lot of backup/recovery partitions, and if you delete the wrong one on accident, you may damage your operating system.

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Question

Is it safe to delete all partitions?

Luigi Oppido
Computer & Tech Specialist
Luigi Oppido is the Owner and Operator of Pleasure Point Computers in Santa Cruz, California. Luigi has over 25 years of experience in general computer repair, data recovery, virus removal, and upgrades. He is also the host of the Computer Man Show! broadcasted on KSQD covering central California for over two years.

Luigi Oppido

Computer & Tech Specialist

Expert Answer

If you're talking about partitions that you personally created and are no longer using, sure. If you're talking about the "built-in" partitions created by Windows, then I wouldn't touch those.

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Question

Are there any programs you can use to edit partitions?

Luigi Oppido
Computer & Tech Specialist
Luigi Oppido is the Owner and Operator of Pleasure Point Computers in Santa Cruz, California. Luigi has over 25 years of experience in general computer repair, data recovery, virus removal, and upgrades. He is also the host of the Computer Man Show! broadcasted on KSQD covering central California for over two years.

Luigi Oppido

Computer & Tech Specialist

Expert Answer

Yes, I'm personally really fond of Partition Magic. It makes it really easy to edit and monitor changes on partition drives, and it will keep you from dramatically altering a partition before you know what your change is going to do.

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Question

I want to remove the partition and reallocate the space to C drive. When I right click on C, the extend volume is in grey. How do I get the unallocated portion to C?

Community Answer

Before you reallocate the space to C drive, you need to delete the partition you don't want first. To do so, right click on the unwanted partition and click "Delete volume." Once you do that there should be an "Unallocated space." Now you can right click on C to extend volume.

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I'm running Windows 7 and followed the instructions to unpartition. The bar on the header of the partition is yellow, not black, and when I right click on C, "Extend volume" is grayed out. What next?

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Community Answer

You may be better off formatting the drive completely after transferring the files to another location (a computer that is not running Windows 7).

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