Summary :

1. Reclaim Unallocated Partition
2. Recover Unallocated Volume
3. Unallocated Data Recovery

Want to know how to recover unallocated partition with data on it? Here, two solutions are listed. Try to use the methods to recover data from unallocated hard drive space with the professional MiniTool software and it would not bring any damage to the original data.

MiniTool Partition Wizard is a complete & advanced Windows Partition Management tool that helps you perform a number of Drive management function on Windows partitions such as copy, merge, extend, wipe, delete, format or slit. The ultimate software gives you full control and lots of flexibility over your HDD, organize & manage Drives as your like.

• Greetings all, I had 2 useless partitions, one at the very beginning of my HD and the second at the very end. My setup is GPT Basic btw. I would like to know, using MiniTool Partition Wizard version 9.1, if it is possible to merge these former partitions (now 'unallocated' space) into the Windows partition (C:)??
• How to move unallocated space to C drive? In general, MiniTool Partition Wizard can help us to easily complete this task via its professional features includ.
• Download MiniTool Partition wizard 2. Free some spaces that you need. This free spaces will indicated as “Unallocated” 3. Select your Ubuntu partition (mine is dev/sda3) Note.

Hard Drive Suddenly Became 'Unallocated'...

Hard drive/external hard drive/USB drive becomes unallocated? Have you ever encountered this issue? What should you do if the unallocated partition contains some important data? Don't worry. This post will show you how to effectively recover unallocated partition with data on it.

What Does It Mean When a Hard Drive Is Unallocated?

First, let's see a true example:

I accidentally deleted a partition that was not to be deleted when re-installing windows and as soon as realized I canceled the setup but the partitions are gone, now the disk is unallocated and I need to recover the lost partition. Can someone please help me to recover it? All of my data is in that partition. Please I really need help.www.tomshardware.com

Unallocated space, sometimes called free space, is logical space on a hard drive that the operating system, e.g Windows, can write to. You cannot use this space without allocation. This means that no programs can be written to the space.

To make use of unallocated space, you need to either create a new partition by using the space or expand an existing partition. However, what if this unallocated space contains massive important files? In this case, you should try other ways to fix unallocated hard drive space. Or, you have to transfer all data on this unallocated space before creating partition or extending partition.

Why Does Hard Drive/External Hard Drive/USB Flash Drive Become Unallocated?

What makes your drive becomes unallocated? There are many reasons that can cause unallocated hard drive.

1. Virus attack
2. Improper operation such as mistaken deletion, unplugging drive improperly from PC (Read more: Accidentally Deleted Recovery Partition? Solutions Are Here!)
3. Hardware failure
4. File system error
5. Hard drive driver is outdated
6. More...

Now, it's time to learn how to fix unallocated hard drive without losing data in Windows 10/8/7. In the following part, there are 2 excellent ways for you to get unallocated hard disk space back.

Way 1: Recover Unallocated Partition Windows 10/8/7 with MiniTool Partition Wizard

If your drive (including computer internal/external hard drive, USB drive, SD card, etc.) becomes unallocated suddenly, you don't need to worry about this. MiniTool Partition Wizard is a good option for recovering unallocated partition in Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7, and so on.

This professional tool offers Partition Recovery feature to help you easily and quickly recover unallocated partition and data as long as new partition has not been created on this unallocated space.

Besides, this professional partition magic offers wizard-based interfaces as well as simple operations which can help users effectively recover unallocated hard disk space without any difficulty.

Watch the Following Video to Know Unallocated Space Recovery.

Step-by-step Guide to Fixing Unallocated Hard Drive Space in Windows 10/8/7 without Losing Data

This software has Free Edition for you to use but it can only scan the lost partitions not recover them. Here, you can download it on your computer to try whether it can find the files you want to recover and then you can decide to get a full version or not.

LOOK! The following is how to recover unallocated partition with data on it.

Step 1: Connect your unallocated drive to PC, and then launch MiniTool Partition Wizard to get its main interface.

Step 2: Select the disk where unallocated partition appears and then click Partition Recovery feature from the left action panel or from the context menu.

Step 3: Choose a scanning range from Full Disk, Unallocated Space, and Specified Range, and then click the Next button. Here, we can click Full Disk to scan the whole hard drive.

Step 4: Set scanning method like Quick Scan to scan the specified range and click Next to continue.

Step 5: Select all needed partitions including existing partitions and deleted/lost partitions, and then click the Finish button to go back to the main interface of MiniTool Partition Wizard.

Before checking partitions, you can double-click the found partition to check its files, as shown below.

If you are using the Free Edition to recover partition, you will get a window to ask you to upgrade to advanced edition to recover unallocated hard drive space without losing data.

Step 6: Select the recovered partition and click Change Drive Letter feature to assign it drive letter, thus you can see it in Windows Explorer. (It is Optional.)

Step 7: Click the Apply button in the top left corner to perform all changes.

See! It is very easy to recover unallocated partition with data on it, isn't it?

Top Recommendation: Free Recover Data from an Unallocated Hard Disk Space.

Way 2: Fix Unallocated Hard Drive with MiniTool Power Data Recovery

As we have said above, if you want to fix unallocated hard drive space without losing data, you should recover data from unallocated space and then create a new partition on this unallocated space or add the unallocated space to existing partition.

Now, you might be wondering:

How to recover unallocated partition in Windows 10/8/7 without damaging the original data?

Want to know the best way?

Move 1: Recover Data from Unallocated Hard Drive Space in Windows 10/8/7

When it comes to unallocated hard drive data recovery, MiniTool Power Data Recovery, green and professional data recovery software developed by famous software development company, proves to be an excellent choice.

With this all-in-one software, you are able to easily, quickly and effectively recover lost data from unallocated hard drive space without damaging the original data because of its high recovery rate, easy recovery operations, and high security. It is no exaggeration to say, even our grandmother can easily use this read-only tool to carry out unallocated hard drive data recovery.

And, it has good compatibility. Various common file systems (like FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, VFAT, and NTFS) and operating systems (like Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10) can be compatible with all modules of MiniTool Power Data Recovery.

And this professional data recovery software allows you to recover files from not only hard disk but also flash drive, memory card, and flash card.

To recover unallocated partition data, get this software. Here you can try the Trial Edition (only scan but not support recovery) to check whether it can help to find the files you need after scanning the unallocated hard disk space. If yes, to complete the recovery operation, just upgrade to the Personal Deluxe.

Now, how do you perform unallocated hard drive data recovery with MiniTool Power Data Recovery?

Step 1: launch MiniTool Power Data Recovery to get its main interface, and then you can see 4 different modules.

• Hard Disk Drive fully supports data recovery from hard disk including mistakenly deleted partitions and drives without partition table because of virus attack.
• Removable Disk Drive can help you recover photo, music and video files from storage devices such as memory cards and USB flash drives.
• CD/DVD Recovery is available for users to recover deleted or lost data from formatted or scratched CD/DVD.
• This PC is designed to recover data from logically damaged, formatted and RAW partitions. In general, the lost file could be recovered by using this module as long as the partition exists.

Here select Hard Disk Drive to recover data from unallocated hard drive space. And choose the target disk, click the Scan button to begin searching partitions on it. This function will scan the whole device, collect and analyze every byte on the device.

If you only want to recover some specified file types, you can click Settings feature before scanning.

Step 2: This data recovery software will start to scan the target disk. To ensure the best recovery result, please wait patiently until the scan completes.

Step 3: Finally, check all the files you want to recover, click the Save button, select a place to save checked files, and click OK button.

Note that never save the needed files to the drive where you lost your data. Otherwise, the lost/deleted files will be overwritten.

See, by using MiniTool Power Data Recovery, you can effectively, quickly and safely recover data from unallocated hard drive space in Windows 10/8/7 within 3 steps. Now, get this software to have a try.

After recovering data, let's see how to make use of this unallocated hard drive space.

Move 2: Fix Unallocated Hard Drive Space in Windows 10/8/7

To allocate unallocated space on a hard drive, you have 2 options: add the unallocated space to a partition or create new partition on the unallocated space.

Option 1: How do I add unallocated space to a partition?

Launch MiniTool Partition Wizard.

Select any existing partition on the drive containing unallocated space, and then click Extend Partitionfeature from the left action panel.

Choose unallocated space from the drop-down list of 'Take Free Space from', drag the sliding handle rightwards, and click OK to continue.

Finally, click Apply to perform changes.

If the whole hard drive becomes unallocated space, you should choose option 2 to get back unallocated hard disk space.

Option 2: How do I create a new partition on the unallocated space?

Launch MiniTool Partition Wizard.

Select the unallocated space, and then click Create Partition feature from the left menu.

Then, confirm Partition Label, Partition Type, Drive Letter, File System, Cluster Size, Partition Volumeand Partition Location, and click OK button to go back to the main interface of the software. If you make no change here, all these parameters are kept by default.

Finally, click Apply to perform all changes.

Top Recommendation: Best Way to Create Partition on Windows 10/8/7/Vista/XP

Bottom Line

Are you still worrying about how to recover unallocated partition in Windows 10/8/7 without losing the original data? Now, you can try the above-mentioned two methods to recover unallocated partition with data on it.

Like this post? Share it to help more users get rid of the unallocated space error!

Should you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to contact us via [email protected] or leave a message below.

Unallocated Partition FAQ

1. Right-click This PC, and select Manage.
2. Click Disk Management.
3. Right-click the unallocated space and select New Simple Volume.
4. Enter the size and click next and you are done.

1. Launch MiniTool Partition Wizard.
2. Right-click C drive and choose Extend Partition,
3. Choose the unallocated space.
4. Drag the sliding handle leftwards or rightwards to decide how much space to take.
5. Click OK and Apply button to perform all changes.

1. Launch MiniTool Partition Wizard.
2. Select the source partition and click Merge Partition from the left action panel.
3. Click Next button to continue.
4. Select the partition that will be included to the target one, and click Finish.
5. Click Apply button in the upper left corner to confirm.

Summary :

Now read this post and find the best solution that helps you to merge C drive in Windows 10 quickly and easily. And, if you are satisfied with MiniTool Partition Wizard, you can try this freeware to benefit from its powerful features.

Kindly Reminder: to avoid confusion, we would like to explain that the C drive and D drive in this post mean the C: partition and D: Partition respectively.

Today Windows 10 is gaining popularity among Windows users. Despite the fact that Windows 10 has been greatly improved in many aspects, we cannot ignore the fact that Windows 10 cannot offer us the best performance if it is running on low disk space, which is usually caused by small partition size for too much files.

And if this happens to your system C drive, then it is necessary to extend C drive Windows 10 as soon as possible. In this post, we will show you how to merge C drive Windows 10 to expand the storage space of the boot partition.

First of all, let’s see a true example to prove that many users have this requirement:

How do I merge two partitions in XP?
I have Windows XP Service Pack 3. Space is getting very low on my NTFS Partition which contains Windows XP. There is partition with over 100GB free space which I would like to access - preferably by merging the two partitions, or of not, by resizing the NTFS partition.
It seems from Googling this that I cannot use native Windows XP software and need a third party application but I see that this is not without risk of data loss. Can anyone advise please?--from answers.microsoft.com

Have you ever troubled by the similar situation? Do you know what should you do to overcome this kind of issue? If you have no idea, maybe you can find the satisfying answer here. Next, we will show two solutions to combine multiple hard drives in Windows 10.

Merge C Drive Windows 10 Using MiniTool Partition Wizard

To merge C drive and D drive in Windows 10, MiniTool Partition Wizard is the best choice, for it offers different solutions towards this issue.

To make it specific, it helps to combine C drive and D drive, combine C drive with nonadjacent unallocated space, and combine C drive with free space…Most important of all, any merging of MiniTool Partition Wizard won't bring any data loss, which is a partition magic in real sense.

Plan A: Use 'Merge Partition' Feature to Merge Partitions Windows 10

MiniTool Partition Wizard offers an easy and safe way to merge adjacent partitions, which is named 'Merge Partition'. This feature is very useful, because it can combine partitions Windows 10 without considering whether they are both primary partition and logical partition.

That is to say, you can use this function to combine primary & primary, primary & logical, and logical & logical, as long as the two partitions are continuous.

Next, we will show you step-by-step guidance.

Step 1. Follow the tutorials below to create a bootable partition manager and using it to boot your PC.

Step 2. Launch the partition manager to get the main interface. Then select any partition to call out partitioning operations. Here please choose 'Merge Partition' from the left action panel or 'Merge' from menu bar.

Step 3. Choose the real C drive which needs extending (drive letter can change into another, just use the Explore feature to check) and then click 'Next'.

Step 4. In this window, select one of the neighboring partitions to be included into the real C drive and click 'Finish'. Here we choose E drive for example.

Step 5. Now we are back to the main interface, where we can preview what is going to happen. See! The partition E will be included into the real partition C. At this time, press 'Apply' to save this change. After that, merging C drive in Windows 10 will is completed. At this time, you can reboot your Windows and open partition C to check the content of the folder named merged_partition_content.

For a more intuitive guidance about how to merge partitions, you can watch this video:

Plan B: Use 'Extend Partition' Feature to Merge Partitions & Unallocated Space Windows 10

In fact, most of the time we need to merge C drive with unallocated space, for this avoids mixing the data of two partitions. Considering this factor, MiniTool Partition Wizard Offers another two features called 'Extend Partition' and 'Move/Resize Partition'.

Both of them can be used to merge C drive with unallocated space on the same disk, and the only difference is that the former can deal with nonadjacent unallocated space while the latter cannot.

It is worth mentioning that both 'Extend Partition' and 'Move/Resize Partition' are available in MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition. Thus, you can download this free partition manager to have a try on Windows 10.

• In MiniTool Partition Wizard, both unallocated space and free space are marked as 'unallocated'. This means you can use both of them to extend primary/logical partition with this partition magic.
• For data safety, changes related to system partition will cause Windows reboot.

Next, we will show you how convenient it is to combine C drive with unallocated space by using MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition.

① Use 'Extend Partition' to merge C drive with faraway unallocated space

Step 1. Launch MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition to the main interface. Then click C drive and choose 'Extend Partition' from action panel or 'Extend' from partition group of menu bar.

Step 2. In the pop-up window, drop down the selection box to choose the unallocated space. Then move cursor to drag the slider leftwards or rightwards (maximum) to determine how much unallocated apace you need. After that, click 'OK' to exit this window.

Step 3. See! The unallocated space will be merged into C drive. Now hit 'Apply' button in tool bar to make this change effective.

② Use 'Move/Resize Partition' to merge C drive with adjacent unallocated space

If the unallocated space is on the neighboring side of C drive, you can also employ 'Move/Resize Partition' to merge C drive Windows 10. Here are the detailed steps:

Step 1. Launch MiniTool Partition Wizard to its main interface. Select partition C and choose 'Move/Resize Partition' from the action panel or 'Move/Resize' from partition group in the menu bar.

Step 2. In the new window, drag the small arrow to occupy the unallocated space and click 'OK'.

Step 3. Look! The unallocated space will be included into C drive. Now press the 'Apply' button.

By now, we have finished the explanation of how to extend C drive Windows 10 by merging partitions and unallocated space without bringing any data loss. Next, we will jump to merge C drive Windows 10 using Windows Disk Management.

Hot Article: The Most Reliable Way to Extend Windows 7 System Partition

Merge Partitions Windows 10 Disk Management

Normally, to combine multiple hard drives Windows 10, the first things that comes to mind is to turn to Windows Disk Management utility to find a solution. But does it offer a way?

Reclaim Unallocated Partition

Next, we will show you how Disk Management works on merging C drives Windows 10 to help you make out whether it is reliable and should be the first choice.

In fact, there is no featured named 'Merge Volume' or something like that in Disk Management. The only feature that can be used to merge partitions we can see, is 'Extend Volume', which is added in Disk Management since Windows Vista, together with 'Shrink Volume'.

However, 'Extend Volume' is always greyed out due to some reasons. For example: only NTFS or RAW partitions can be extended; only unallocated space and free space can be used to extend partition; only when the unallocated space or free space is following the target partition, 'Extend Volume' is available.…

Thus, to combine partitions Windows 10 by using Disk Management, you need to consider more. And, in general, there are 3 situations you need to take into account:

① When it is Unallocated Space following C Drive

Recover Unallocated Volume

As we have just explained, only unallocated space can be used to extend system partition. Thus, it is lucky for you to use this feature directly. Right click partition C, choose 'Extend Volume' from the menu, and follow the instructions in Extend Volume Wizard to go through all steps.

② When it is Primary Partition following C Drive

If there is a primary partition following the C drive, 'Extend Volume' is inactive. In this case, you need to make that primary partition into unallcoated space before you can use 'Extend Volume'to merge C drive Windows 10.

Unallocated Data Recovery

Right click the primary partition and choose 'Delete Volume' to make it unallocated space at first. Then right click the C drive and use 'Extend Volume' which is now available.

③ When it is Logical Partition following C Drive

If it is a logical partition following the C drive, then 'Extend Volume' is also greyed out.

In this case, you need to delete that logical partition at first to make it free space.

But this is not the whole story, because free space cannot be used to extend primary partition. Thus, you still need to delete the free space to make it unallocated space. And finally, 'Extend Volume' of C drive is activated, and you can use it to merge C drive Windows 10 now.

After reading this part, you know how to merge C drive Windows 10 Disk Management. However, you should also be aware of that for lossless merging, you need a third party partition manager rather than the system built-in Disk Management Tool. Aiming at this situation, we suggest using the professional partitioning tool - MiniTool Partition Wizard to merge C drive in Windows 10, because it perfectly supports Windows 10 and does partitioning operations flexibly.

Bottom Line

In this post, well mainly talk about why merge C drive Windows 10, how to merge C drive Windows 10 by using MiniTool Partition Wizard and Disk Management respectively.

Now it's your turn. If your Windows 10 C drive is also running out of disk space, extend it by merging with the neighboring partition or unallocated space on the same drive. And the partition manager MiniTool Partition Wizard can help realize lossless merging.

If you have any questions towards using MiniTool Partition Wizard, welcome to leave us comments below or send us email via [email protected]. Thanks in advance!