Why do you need to merge partitions?

You may construct a bigger hard drive and increase the available space on a partition by combining two partitions into one. This is incredibly beneficial if your discs are filling up and you need additional room to store files, programs, and other items. You may need to merge partitions when:

• One of your partitions is running out of space while other partitions are nearly empty.
• There are a few partitions on the hard disk and you want to get a fewer number of partitions so as to make it easy to manage them.
• You want to create new partitions to classify your data files but the number of your partition reaches the upper limit.

There is built-in Disk Management for you to merge partitions, however, you need to delete the other partition before merging since Disk Management cannot directly resize the partition.

Fortunately, there is a third-party tool AOMEI Partition Assistant which can merge partitions directly without deleting other partitions in advance. And except for partition merging, there are a lot of other functions provided by Partition Assistant while Disk Management does not have, such as split partition, partition/disk copy, partition recovery, and partition alignment.

Before you do

1. This operation may change the original location of your data, so we suggest you learn the tutorial "How to Safely Partition" before executing this operation.

2. You can only merge 2 partitions at one time, and the two partitions must be adjacent. However, you can merge two or more parts of unallocated space into a partition.

3. You can merge the data partition into the system boot drive, however, you cannot merge the system boot drive into the data partition. The "System Reserved" partition could not be merged.

4. System partition or boot partition cannot be merged with the front partition.

5. Partitions laid on different hard disks can’t be merged.

6. Merge two nearly full partitions is not recommended for might cause data loss. Since the most merging of partitions is for getting more free space, thus merge two such partitions has no use.

How to Merge Partitions with Partition Assistant

The followings are step-by-step guides to merging two partitions and merging unallocated space into a partition. Please choose the right one according to your need.

Tips: No matter which case you choose, please download AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional Demo in order to follow the guide.

Case 1: Merge two partitions into one

1. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant. Right-click the partition (here is C:) you want to merge, and click "Advanced" and then select the "Merge Partitions" feature in the drop-down menu.

2. In the pop-up window, tick the partition (here is C:) in the check box and select the other partition (we choose D:). And then click "OK" to continue.

Tips: You can select either partition as the target partition. For example, we select G: as the target partition. After the operation of merge partition, all the data on partition H: will be transferred into G:\h-drive.

3. To start the operation, please click "Apply" on the toolbar. Then, you can preview the conversion under "Pending Operations". Then, you can click "Proceed" to start the merge operation.

4. Wait for the process to be finished. Once it is finished, you will find D: is merged into C: partition.

Case 2: Merge unallocated space into a partition

1. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant. In this example, there is an unallocated space behind D: partition. Right-click the partition (here is D:) where you want to merge unallocated space to and click "Advanced" and then select the "Merge Partitions" feature in the drop-down menu.

2. In the pop-up window, tick the check boxes of which are in front of the partition and the unallocated space, and then click "OK" to continue. In this case, you cannot specify the target partition because D: is selected as the target partition in default and there is no other choice.

3. You can preview changes. To start the operation, please click "Apply" on the toolbar. Then, you can preview the conversion under "Pending Operations". Then, you can click "Proceed" to start the merge operation.

4. Wait for the process to be finished. Once it is finished, you will find the unallocated space is merged into D:.

Conclusion

The partitions merge operation has been finished after the above steps. This feature is usually used to expand partitions with the space of another partition or unallocated space on the same disk. It helps you make full use of your whole drive space.

 

Notes:

• If the partition has running applications, AOMEI Partition Assistant will suggest you close them or perform the operation under PreOS Mode.
• The host partition (destination partition) needs to have at least 1 GB of free space before merging. If there is not, try to get from another partition or unallocated space by resizing the partition.
• You may still encounter other problems during the merge partition process, please refer to "Cannot Merge Partitions".

 

FAQs:

Q: Will data on one partition be lost after merging it into another partition?

A: Normally, there will be a folder of the original partition created in the target partition to save data from the original partition.

Q: Why the "merge partition" option is grayed out?

A: You may encounter this problem in 4 cases. Please click here to check possible solutions.

Q: When I want to merge C drive and the unallocated space, it can't be ticked. How to solve it?

A: Please click here to see how to merge C drive that is less than 1GB with unallocated space.