Unallocated disk space is huge, how to combine both "partitions"?

[Dunkan77]

Hello guys,

I'm sorry if the title doesn't speak to you, it's because I have never seen nor encountered this issue before so bear with my poor choice of words. With that out of the way, the problem:
See, I just formatted my old PC's HDD to reinstall Win 8 on it because Win XP was very slow. I noticed that huge chunk of space marked as "Unallocated Disk Space" on the drive, which is the location I chose for the OS, then the normal portion of it when the installer prompted me the choice of the windows location. It's a 250 GB(230 GB effective) drive and the unallocated space was 86 GB so it's a lot.
Things only got worse after I finished setting up the profile: the usable disk space, the part not marked unallocated, was 146 GB and after all that it's now 85 GB. Also, I backed up my Steam library on the drive, thinking that the installation would happen normally and just create a folder named Windows but it hid my backups AND fused it with the already existing 85 GB of unallocated space now making it 2/3 of my drive unusable form inside the OS... Please tell me how to fix this guys as I can't afford buying a new HDD and now my 230GB(effective space) drive is down to 85 GB and I lost my backups of drivers, games, important software and some personal media like family photos and birthday videos spanning 12 years. I just hope this data can be recovered and the HDD fused togeter into one large and only 230 GB chunk.

Sorry for being so long but I couldn't explain this simply and I'm a dunce when it comes to software related storage issues and topics.
Thanks for a professional, easy to understand and complete answer

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there Dunkan77,

Regarding the data recovery, I would say that you will need to use some data recovery software. Also, keep in mind that some your data may be overwritten(in the process of installing Windows, creating partitions, etc). You will have to borrow a HDD, attach it to your computer(internally or through SATA to USB cable) and save all the recovered data on the drive. You need to do this in order not to overwrite(with saving some files) the data on your drive.
Check this thread out: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-1644496/lost-data-recovery.html
When you retrieve your data, or at least some of it, you can go to Disk Management -> right click -> extend partition. If this does not work, you can use some third party partition management tool.

Hope this will help,
D_Know_WD

 

[Bakhus Mps]

1.Get an external HDD or USB stick, with a capacity that fits what you need saving.
2.Grab EASEUS data recovery, run it, pick what you need saving.
3.Grab EASEUS partition manager, play with your partitions as needed, it's easy and intuitive.

 

[Dunkan77]

Hi there Dunkan77,

Regarding the data recovery, I would say that you will need to use some data recovery software. Also, keep in mind that some your data may be overwritten(in the process of installing Windows, creating partitions, etc). You will have to borrow a HDD, attach it to your computer(internally or through SATA to USB cable) and save all the recovered data on the drive. You need to do this in order not to overwrite(with saving some files) the data on your drive.
Check this thread out: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-1644496/lost-data-recovery.html
When you retrieve your data, or at least some of it, you can go to Disk Management -> right click -> extend partition. If this does not work, you can use some third party partition management tool.

Hope this will help,
D_Know_WD

Thanks a lot! The guide would've worked but I recovered every thing and finally decided on making a small 25 GB partiton with ONLY the OS on it. But thank you very much: this is the type of answer I was expecting

 

[D_Know_WD]

I'm glad you sorted this out.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD