creating a spanned volume (memory)

Angel Eyes

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Hey guys, I have an envy 17 3d laptop made by HP. HP set up the drives on my laptop in this way, Drive 0 has a total of 74.53 GB and contains the operating system. Drive 1 has 931.51 GB. Recently drive 0 has been filling up and I can't remedy the problem. Last night when I turned off my computer I had 13 GB free, today I turn it on and I have 5 GB free. Why the hell did they put the operating system and the majority of all the factory installed programs on a drive with only 74 GB when they had over 900 gb's of free space to use on the other drive? Anyways, trying to navigate a computer for me is hard and confusing. I've tried to copy files from C drive to my D drive which I can do but a lot of the time it wont let me delete the files on c afterward. (OS:C is on Drive 0, D is on drive 1...) anyways, I'm buying a 1tb external hard drive today cause I was reading about creating a "spanned volume" last night online. I've defragged drive C and deleted what files I can, but I don't want to have to deal with always having to fight for memory, since a lot of the time when I download files online it doesn't give me an option which drive to put it on it automatically goes to drive C. Any thoughts?
 
What have you got on the 900gb partition?

If you are happy to backup everything from the 900gb partition onto the external drive, you can use a tool such as Gparted you can delete that partition and then extend the 75gb partition.
 
Are you totally sure it's a single drive that's partitoned, rather than a small SSD and a storage drive? That's becoming quite a common setup for laptops. The reason for the odd volume size could easily be a hidden backup partition, plus the fact that windows uses binary sizes rather than decimal which is normal for drive manufacturers.

Open device manager (just use the search function to find it) then drop down the hard drive section and post the contents here. Do not attempt to do anything else until we're sure it's a single drive.


For what it's worth, a spanned drive isn't what you want at all. If it's a single hard drive, what you'd want to do is increase the partition size, while shrinking the other one. If you have a SSD, you're pretty much out of luck. Just learn to manage drive space more effectively. I'll give further instructions on what do do when we're sure what needs to be done.

The absolute worst thing you can do is span to an external drive, as you suggested. Seriously, don't even consider it.




Neodude: Gparted is notorious for corrupting NTFS partitions. In my experience, it fails at least 50% of the time. Windows 7 has a disk management tool built in, which does a much better job.
 
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Ok, if it is only one Hard Drive, all you have to do is:
1. Right click on "computer" in start menu.
2. Choose "Manage".
3. Now find a tab called "Disk management", if it is not show, then it is hidden under tab "Storage"
4. After you click on it and let it load, there are few things you have to do to extend the partition.
5. Right click on the name of you bigger storage (Probably that 900 Gig one) and choose "Shrink Volume". In the new window that showed up (Look at it closely so you don't mess up) type in a value that you want that dick to be shrinked by,
6. Right click your OS partition and choose "Extend Volume" and now just type in the value (Probably as much as you chose to shrink in your storage partition) and thats all...

- I didn't really explain everything, but after step 4, it is really about "Look and you will figure it out" type of stuff...

[DO THIS ONLY IF YOU ARE SURE THAT YOU HAVE ONLY 1 HDD IN YOUR SYSTEM]
 
With HP that D partition is usually protected and has the recovery files. Dunno if Windows will allow any changes to its configurations; e.g. formatting or deleting.
 
With HP that D partition is usually protected and has the recovery files. Dunno if Windows will allow any changes to its configurations; e.g. formatting or deleting.

Oh, I didn't think of that... (Having Custom PC makes you forget a lot about the manufacturer restrictions xD)
 
I got rid of this annoyance in my HP laptop by completely deleting all partitions then downloading the same version of Windows and all needed drivers from HP's website.

Also that method will not work if the shrunk part of the D partition goes to the right side of the equation. There should not be used sectors between the two partitions for them to be able to exchange capacity, that is why the best way to do it is to completely delete the partition and have it completely unallocated.

Yup, a little complicated alright... hmm...

Well, for now lets at least wait for the confirmation it is one physical HDD or else all of the above would be wasted God forbid.
 
I got rid of this annoyance in my HP laptop by completely deleting all partitions then downloading the same version of Windows and all needed drivers from HP's website.

Also that method will not work if the shrunk part of the D partition goes to the right side of the equation. There should not be used sectors between the two partitions for them to be able to exchange capacity, that is why the best way to do it is to completely delete the partition and have it completely unallocated.

Yup, a little complicated alright... hmm...

Well, for now lets at least wait for the confirmation it is one physical HDD or else all of the above would be wasted God forbid.

You are a Smart Guy :D Get it? xD
Anyway, yeah, if it is a small ssd and a hard drive then the method I mentioned before wouldn't work.
 
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