Can I combine two hard disks together?

[Common]

I have purchased a Toshiba laptop recently and when i checked its hard drive it was having 250 gb of space. Now, here it has been partitioned in the equal size with C: drive and E: drive. I was wondering if there is anyway to combine both of these partition, so that i can have a sinle logical drive on my system. So, is there anyway to perform such action on Windows Vista operating system that i have?

[DeMario]

I think that the 2 drives that you have on your laptop is next to each other which is contiguous. And if the E: drive is not your recovery volume then you can try to run the disk management with the command diskmgmt.msc to remove the same volume and then expand the C: drive with the free space which will be unallocated. Note that if these drives are not contiguous then you will need some third party tool to combine them.

[Sabastiaan]

You can try to use the Acronis Disk Director which is an application with 3 components dedicated to the management and maintenance of hard drives. The various features of this pack are as follows:

• Partition management: allows you to resize, move, copy, split, and merge partitions without losing your data;
• Acronis Recovery Expert: allows you to restore accidentally lost or deleted partitions;
• Acronis OS Selector: install multiple operating systems on a single computer.

There are many features, but in the lot, we note the presence of the partition manager. This module is particularly powerful successor to the famous "Partition Magic" tool. It will give you the ability to create, modify and delete partitions with ease (in most cases, you will not even have to reboot your computer)!

[Eber]

There is no need of third party tools to merge or combine drives of a hard drive. You can simply use the Disk Management tool that is already there in Vista for such things. Just follow the below steps:

• You need to first of all right-click in the Free Space and choose New Simple Volume. After that tell the wizard to create a large volume, say 100 GB. Also do not assign it a drive letter yet or format it.
• After that right-click in the remaining Free Space (about 15 GB) and choose New Simple Volume again. This time, let it use up all the remaining space
• (about 15 GB). Format it and assign it Drive X:.
• Now while using Windows Explorer, copy ALL the contents of Drive E: into Drive X:.
• Now just check all your files are safely in Drive X:, and then right-click in Drive E: and Delete Volume.
• After that right-click on Drive X: and Change Drive Letter and Paths. Change X: to E:.
• Now just check that you have Free Space of about 100 GB between Drive C:
• and Drive E:.
• After that right-click on Drive C: and Extend Volume. Let the Wizard default to use ALL the available space.