[SOLVED] I tried to extend my C Drive,but i messsed up

[SawmMawia]

I tried my best to make it simple and easy to understand,but i am not very good at english
Hope you understand

I am using windows 10

My hard drive is a 500 Gb HDD(465.76 GB)

I used to have 5 drives,C Drive(84.75 GB) E Drive(120.01 GB) F Drive(100.01 Gb) S Drive(150.01 Gb) and K Drive(10.99 Gb)

I thought of deleting K drive and adding that 10.99 gb to my c drive,then i went to disk management,deleted my K drive as it was always empty,after deleting it,a new green box appeared which was named free space,then i right clicked on my c drive and tried to click on extend but it was greyed

I dont know what i was thinking at that time but i even shrinked my S drive to 27.50 gb and created a new G Drive(122.51 Gb)

Here is the pic:https://pasteboard.co/K1gnYwL.jpg
My question is how do i transfer those 10.99 gb free space to my c drive and also transfer the 27.50 gb to my G drive
(You will have to see the pic in order ro understand)

 

[DSzymborski]

You can only extend adjacent partitions. So you can extend C: to that 27.50 GB but moving the 10.99 GB back to G: will be trickier.

Do you have another actual physical drive available? There's always a risk of data loss when playing around with the partitions. The whole hard drive seems to be a mess; you've used partitions when you should have gone with using different folders instead. Using partitions as pseudo-folders just creates an unwieldy mess.

It also appears you're storing backups in a different partition of the same drive as the originals, which is a really terrible way to backup data.

 

[SawmMawia]

You can only extend adjacent partitions. So you can extend C: to that 27.50 GB but moving the 10.99 GB back to G: will be trickier.

Do you have another actual physical drive available? There's always a risk of data loss when playing around with the partitions. The whole hard drive seems to be a mess; you've used partitions when you should have gone with using different folders instead. Using partitions as pseudo-folders just creates an unwieldy mess.

It also appears you're storing backups in a different partition of the same drive as the originals, which is a really terrible way to backup data.

Dont worry about data loss,i dont care,i dont have any important files anyway
Btw i dont have another physical hard drive

 

[Bob.B]

I tried my best to make it simple and easy to understand,but i am not very good at english
Hope you understand

I am using windows 10

My hard drive is a 500 Gb HDD(465.76 GB)

I used to have 5 drives,C Drive(84.75 GB) E Drive(120.01 GB) F Drive(100.01 Gb) S Drive(150.01 Gb) and K Drive(10.99 Gb)

I thought of deleting K drive and adding that 10.99 gb to my c drive,then i went to disk management,deleted my K drive as it was always empty,after deleting it,a new green box appeared which was named free space,then i right clicked on my c drive and tried to click on extend but it was greyed

I dont know what i was thinking at that time but i even shrinked my S drive to 27.50 gb and created a new G Drive(122.51 Gb)

Here is the pic:https://pasteboard.co/K1gnYwL.jpg
My question is how do i transfer those 10.99 gb free space to my c drive and also transfer the 27.50 gb to my G drive
(You will have to see the pic in order ro understand)

The partition tool in windows is a bit limited.
I keep a copy of partition wizard in a draw.
Boot it up and I have many more options for adjusting partitions.

 

[hang-the-9]

Why are you even bothering with the various small partitions? If you don't have anything you want to keep, do a clean Windows setup, delete all existing partitions when you do that, create a single one and install Windows to it. I see you have a "backup" partition. If it's on the same drive, it's not really a backup just a copy. If you actually want a backup you should do that on a second drive.

Best idea here is to get a second drive, copy your files to that, format and install Windows clean on the existing drive and keep that other drive for backups.

 

[Grobe]

I have to put out some words about the backup too. So this is like if your house burn, then your normal "backup" is having an emergency exit and a plan to get out of the house.
But the way you've done your (non) backup is comparable to running into another room in that very same house.

If you're not intended to save any of that data, you could just install windows all over, wipe everything on the drive and set up another partition scheme.

Alternatively, you could use something like Gparted, a tool that is designed to manipulate disk partitions. NB: All such modification of partitions involves a risk of loosing everything (if memory corruption, power loss or something else) on that hard drive.

 

[SawmMawia]

You can only extend adjacent partitions. So you can extend C: to that 27.50 GB but moving the 10.99 GB back to G: will be trickier.

Do you have another actual physical drive available? There's always a risk of data loss when playing around with the partitions. The whole hard drive seems to be a mess; you've used partitions when you should have gone with using different folders instead. Using partitions as pseudo-folders just creates an unwieldy mess.

It also appears you're storing backups in a different partition of the same drive as the originals, which is a really terrible way to backup data.

Why are you even bothering with the various small partitions? If you don't have anything you want to keep, do a clean Windows setup, delete all existing partitions when you do that, create a single one and install Windows to it. I see you have a "backup" partition. If it's on the same drive, it's not really a backup just a copy. If you actually want a backup you should do that on a second drive.

Best idea here is to get a second drive, copy your files to that, format and install Windows clean on the existing drive and keep that other drive for backups.

So youre telling me to re install windows and create a big 500 gb drive?

 

[DSzymborski]

So youre telling me to re install windows and create a big 500 gb drive?

Yes, format the entire hard drive and start fresh. Or at most, have a partition for Windows and a partition for the other stuff. But from what I see, you're using your many partitions for jobs that individual folders would do more effectively.

This is a tiny drive by 2021 standards and using partitions for tasks that don't call for partitions, you're either going to have a micromanaging nightmare or you're going to lose much of the space you already have. Which is exactly what's going on right now; you've got a mess because of micromanaging a tiny 10 GB portion, less than 3% of your drive's capacity.

 

[USAFRet]

Dont worry about data loss,i dont care,i dont have any important files anyway
Btw i dont have another physical hard drive

Wipe and reinstall.

Start over completely.
1 partition.

How To - Windows 10 clean install tutorial

If you are looking for the Windows 11 Clean install tutorial, you can find that here: Windows 11 Clean install tutorial (Click here) Otherwise, welcome to the Windows 10 Clean install tutorial This tutorial is intended to help you, step by step, to perform a clean install of Windows...

forums.tomshardware.com

 

[SawmMawia]

Wipe and reinstall.

Start over completely.
1 partition.

How To - Windows 10 clean install tutorial

If you are looking for the Windows 11 Clean install tutorial, you can find that here: Windows 11 Clean install tutorial (Click here) Otherwise, welcome to the Windows 10 Clean install tutorial This tutorial is intended to help you, step by step, to perform a clean install of Windows...

forums.tomshardware.com

God
Please dont tell me i need an usb stick or a dvd to perform it

 

[SkyNetRising]

To get one partition on whole disk, there's no need to reinstall windows.
Just delete all extra partitions (except C: ),
delete extended partition and
extend C: to whole disk.
Done in 5 minutes (if you don't need to backup data from those extra partitions).

 

[Arbitage]

You can only extend adjacent partitions. So you can extend C: to that 27.50 GB but moving the 10.99 GB back to G: will be trickier.

Do you have another actual physical drive available? There's always a risk of data loss when playing around with the partitions. The whole hard drive seems to be a mess; you've used partitions when you should have gone with using different folders instead. Using partitions as pseudo-folders just creates an unwieldy mess.

It also appears you're storing backups in a different partition of the same drive as the originals, which is a really terrible way to backup data.

I know a method to extend non-adjacent partitions. There is a software called EaseUS that does this. . What it does is in the middle partition, it cyclically shifts the data from the beginning to the end and re-locks the beginning and end of that middle partition. My question is Are there any free open-source alternatives that does this operation? This seems like a low level but easy operation, I don't understand why windows's built in disk management tool can't do this. It is so puny and feels so useless (you can't even delete EFI system partitions there (sometimes you need to), you have to circumvent this from the diskpart command line)

 

[SkyNetRising]

My question is Are there any free open-source alternatives that does this operation?

There are. Minitool partition wizard free - for example. It's free, but not open source.
Be aware - all partition move/merge operations are extremely risky and should be avoided at all cost or backup is absolutely necessary.
Very easy to loose data this way.

 

[Arbitage]

There are. Minitool partition wizard free - for example. It's free, but not open source.
Be aware - all partition move/merge operations are extremely risky and should be avoided at all cost or backup is absolutely necessary.
Very easy to loose data this way.

I have done these kinds of operations at least 100s of times with EaseUS and nothing bad happened. Everyone says this about partition operations. Nowadays they build these devices with extremely low error rates like 1 in a million and even then there are very robust Error Correction Codes (like LDPCC)

 

[USAFRet]

I have done these kinds of operations at least 100s of times with EaseUS and nothing bad happened. Everyone says this about partition operations. Nowadays they build these devices with extremely low error rates like 1 in a million and even then there are very robust Error Correction Codes (like LDPCC)

Yet routinely, we read here where it went wrong.

Oops, I merged the wrong partitions
Oops, the power got cut partway through
Oops oops oops.

There is nothing wrong with having a backup before you start. There is potentially many things wrong if you don't.

Doing everything perfectly, sure it works. But Murphy raises his head far too often.

 

[Arbitage]

Yet routinely, we read here where it went wrong.

Oops, I merged the wrong partitions
Oops, the power got cut partway through
Oops oops oops.

There is nothing wrong with having a backup before you start. There is potentially many things wrong if you don't.

Doing everything perfectly, sure it works. But Murphy raises his head far too often.

Thanks, btw, just as I found you here, I want to ask you something.

There is an SSD branded Hikvision which was working with very long response times ~900ms or sometimes even 4000~ms, data write speeds dipped to zero many times in a single 10GB single-shot single chunk file write.

After a while we periodically checked that SSD for reallocated sector count. We noted that it increased gradually after some writes from ~1Ch = 28 to ~1Dh after a write of windows iso file and to 39 at its final sort of "failure": The device is now in a state where no write operations can be made. You cannot erase it, format it, or delete partitions of it (even with all the 3rd party "tools" I tried: EaseUS, EaseUS on windows 7 HDDlowlevelformattool etc etc.). After a windows reboot or offline online' ing the disk all the supposedly erased data comes back. Is there a low level way of clearing this hard read only flag?(diskpart command to clear readonly mode does not work, windows thinks this drive is ok no readonly flag is there etc..) We don't have any important data to lose from it, we just want to squeeze the last bit of life out of it

Here is the last smart data with decimal values:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SMART data for [1] Haikon Hikvision SSD C100 240G S1011A0 [240,05 GB] (468862128 512-byte sectors)

Attribute Current Worst Raw Note
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 01 Read error rate 100 100 0
5 05 Reallocated sectors count 100 100 39
9 09 Power-on time 100 100 3214
12 0C Power Cycles 100 100 403
160 A0 Unknown 100 100 848
161 A1 Unknown 100 100 7
163 A3 Unknown 100 100 12
164 A4 Unknown 100 100 20130
165 A5 Unknown 100 100 126
166 A6 Unknown 100 100 12
167 A7 Unknown 100 100 40
168 A8 Unknown 100 100 7000
169 A9 Unknown 100 100 100
175 AF Unknown 100 100 0
176 B0 Unknown 100 100 0
177 B1 Unknown 100 100 0
178 B2 Unknown 100 100 39
181 B5 Unknown 100 100 0
182 B6 Unknown 100 100 0
192 C0 Power-off retract count 100 100 19
194 C2 HDA Temperature 100 100 48 (48 degrees)
195 C3 Hardware ECC recovered 100 100 211289
196 C4 Reallocate event count 100 100 848
197 C5 Current pending sectors 100 100 39
198 C6 Offline scan UNC sectors 100 100 848
199 C7 Ultra ATA CRC Error Rate 100 100 2
232 E8 Available Reserved Space 100 100 7
241 F1 Unknown 100 100 56138
242 F2 Unknown 100 100 77082
245 F5 Unknown 100 100 153759
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Before 4GB windows iso copy:

After:

+

It seems in a way that either the manufacturer is FAKING the wear level count or something else is happening here.
Now in readonly mode the SSD is a lot faster you can make reads at the advertised speeds now. ~The dips are nowhere near and the response time climbs to at most 10ms'ish values


Also at the last times I changed the sata port that this SSD was connected to just before this flag error happened.

 

[SkyNetRising]

The device is now in a state where no write operations can be made. You cannot erase it, format it, or delete partitions of it

You can try performing secure erase.

But if drive has exhausted all write cycles and locked itself, then there's nothing you can do.
Replace the drive.

 

[USAFRet]

Yep, that's looking like an exhausted drive.

 

[Arbitage]

You can try performing secure erase.

But if drive has exhausted all write cycles and locked itself, then there's nothing you can do.
Replace the drive.

As you can see above the write count is only at around 2000 GB ~ 2 TB. Which is ~100 times below its advertised rating value (even when devices pass this rating they don't fail instantly only the probability of failure doubles or sth ~analogous to an exponential radioactive isotope decay that we see in nuclear physics for example) .

It is a new SSD btw, only around 6 months old.
Very strange never seen an SSD fail this early this way. And S.M.A.R.T. is not even flinching at something is wrong or not.

So for example, this will happen to an old samsung SSD when it completes its circle of life ? Do all SSD's die this way?
,

You can try performing secure erase.

I think secure erase is for something else, ~like making the data unrecoverable in the future by someone else (secure erase just writes zeros in all places of the SSD not just disallocating (removing the pointers)). Before you sell an SSD , you do this, right?
And in my case I tried hdd low level format utility(which does this aforementioned task, I think), and it did nothing. It cannot erase anything of the SSD.

 

[USAFRet]

Try the secure erase.
If that fails....try a warranty replacement.

Not all drives die the same way.

And while 'age' may be an indicator, being 'new' is no guarantee of 'not failing'. No matter what type drive.

 

[SkyNetRising]

It is a new SSD btw, only around 6 months old.

Warranty replacement then. Hope you don't have any personal data on it.

Very strange never seen an SSD fail this early this way. And S.M.A.R.T. is not even flinching at something is wrong or not.
So for example, this will happen to an old samsung SSD when it completes its circle of life ? Do all SSD's die this way?

Yeah. $hit happens.
My 970 evo got locked too. It had only ~10TBW (rated for 300TBW).

I think secure erase is for something else, ~like making the data unrecoverable in the future by someone else (secure erase just writes zeros in all places of the SSD not just disallocating (removing the pointers)). Before you sell an SSD , you do this, right?

There are different kinds of secure erase. Some write zeroes (bad for ssd, because uses write cycles), some change psid and make data unrecoverable.
Sometimes with secure erase you can bring locked ssd back to life.

 

[USAFRet]

My 970 evo got locked too. It had only ~10TBW (rated for 300TBW).

My 960GB Sandisk died, at maybe 15% of the warranty TBW number.
Then....dead. No idea why. Completely dead suddenly, no warning.

Of course, it was 33 days past the 3 year warranty. I knew it was over, they knew it was over.
Sandisk did me a solid and replaced it anyway.

 

[Arbitage]

Warranty replacement then. Hope you don't have any personal data on it.

Yeah. $hit happens.
My 970 evo got locked too. It had only ~10TBW (rated for 300TBW).

There are different kinds of secure erase. Some write zeroes (bad for ssd, because uses write cycles), some change psid and make data unrecoverable.
Sometimes with secure erase you can bring locked ssd back to life.

Thank you. You guys are so helpful. ( I had a chunk of personal data, but, the SSD is readonly, so I can read from it and copy the data at immense speeds without problems. Lmao, even faster than before the crippled speeds I posted above, that "low-level" write-lock flag made the SSD perfect for reading from it). Actually I have a bit of software written on it and they work, but it is like an internet café's-hamachi-write protection. Every software update you supposedly do is NOT actually getting physically written on the NAND flash.

There are different kinds of secure erase. Some write zeroes (bad for ssd, because uses write cycles), some change psid and make data unrecoverable.
Sometimes with secure erase you can bring locked ssd back to life.

Can you give me the link(s) for the secure erase software you wrote about above? (Not the one that fills zeros, the other ones)

 

[SkyNetRising]

Can you give me the link(s) for the secure erase software you wrote about above? (Not the one that fills zeros, the other ones)

Usually you have to use manufacturer specific tool for ssd secure erase.
http://en.hikstorage.com/Question/DownLoadCenter?categoryId=d3687913-9bf5-409e-a1d4-2156e1103ebe

There are tools for secure erase on Parted Magic bootable iso also.