unable to merge primary partition with free space

Question

I want to merge my C drive with free space. But there isn't an option for this on Windows 8. Does anyone know how I would do this?

Answer 1

Solution

In order to extend a volume through the built-in disk management utility, there are some requirements. Here's what the documentation says:

For logical drives, boot, or system volumes, you can extend the volume only into contiguous space and only if the disk can be upgraded to a dynamic disk.

To extend a basic volume, it must either raw (not formatted with a file system), or it must be formatted with the NTFS file system.

_{Source: Extend a Basic Volume}

In this case, what you need to do is to right-click the free space volume, and choose Delete Volume from the context menu. The space will become unallocated, and you should be able to extend the volume.

Further reading

• Extend a Basic Volume

Answer 2

I've just now gone through a similar problem except that in my case the partitions weren't contiguous, meaning that I had a Recovery Partition between (C:) and the free space.

In order to merge the primary partition with the free space I combined the following two answers

• How to delete the Recovery Partition in Windows 10?

• Merge non-contiguous partition on Windows 10

So, I started by deleting the free space which then got me "unallocated space". After I removed the Recovery Partition using DiskPart. Then I was able to expand (this is what you mean with "merge") the primary partition just fine.