Can I delete a partition without losing data?
Hi everyone. Leo Notenboom for askleo.com here's
the question. "Is it possible to remove a partition and have its data left behind?
I do need the data, just not the partition."
No, but yes. There are ways of doing exactly what you're asking for.
Unfortunately, it's not as simple as I think you want it to be.
So a partition is really just a way
to divide up a disk into multiple what they call logical disks.
For example, let's have a look at my Windows 10 machine here.
I've got the disk manager fired up already, and you can see that this
physical disk disk zero, which is a 100 gigabyte disk,
is actually divided into four partitions, four areas on the disk.
There's this system partition, this 579 megabyte partition.
There's the partition that contains the C: DRIVE 48.71gb.
There's a second partition which has about a little over 50GB.
And then there's this recovery partition at the end, which is 561 megabytes.
Those are fixed sizes.
In other words, no matter how much data I try to put into any of those partitions,
those partitions are going to take up that amount of space.
What's important to understand is
that when you delete a partition, it's a lot like deleting a file.
What you're deleting is the information that tells you where the partition is.
It doesn't actually erase the data.
So in theory,
the data could be recoverable by forensic tools, but not by tools that you and I
would want to use day to day, and certainly not in a way that I would
consider to be safe to guarantee that your data is recoverable.
So what you need to do is something
a little bit different rather than just deleting the partition.
You can see, I've got the second partition e highlighted here.
Let's assume that it has a bunch of data on it that I don't want to lose.
The approach to take is to save that data somewhere else first.
So there are two different ways that I conceptualize doing that.
One is you can use a backup program like Macrium Reflect or EaseUS,
Todo or any of the others, and just back up that one partition.
You can back up the whole hard drive if
you like, but just back up that one partition.
So in a case like this,
I would back up all of the second partition that you see on the screen.
That way the data has been preserved and placed in an image file or just
somewhere so that you can restore it later.
You can get to that data later.
The other approach, of course,
is to be even less fancy about it and just copy the data.
In other words,
go to your second partition, the partition that you want to delete,
and take care to just copy all of that data somewhere else.
There are two places you can copy it to if there's enough room on C,
you could copy it all to C and you're done, right, the date has been saved.
More commonly, this scenario arises
because we're out of space, and I'll talk about that in a minute.
But more commonly, what you really end up
wanting to do is take everything that's on e or the second partition or
the partition you're wanting to delete and copy it to something else.
Copy it to an external hard drive, copy it to a USB thumb drive,
copy it to another machine on your network, whatever.
You're copying all of that information somewhere else.
In a sense, you're making a backup of it, but you're making a copy of it somewhere
else so that you can then delete the partition.
Now, when you are ready to do that, you've copied off all your data and you
know that when you delete the partition, you're not going to lose anything.
Then the thing to do, I'll show you here.
It's really easy to do.
I'm going to right click on this partition that I know I no longer need.
I'm going to delete the volume.
This will erase all the data on it.
Back up any data you want to keep before deleting.
That's the trick.
That's what I've just been describing for you to do.
Make sure that you've got that data safe somewhere.
And then we'll continue and then poof, it's gone.
The drive is gone.
Now, the normal scenario,
the scenario that I alluded to earlier, is that people see this on their hard
drive and they're looking because their C drive is full.
They've run out of space on their C drive,
but they see this other partition that has lots of free space in it,
or maybe it is empty, maybe it's like this,
and they just want to make the C drive bigger by using that space.
In this case, this case that we're looking
at on the screen, it's actually not that difficult to do.
We also need to delete the partition,
and then we can go over to the C drive and we can say extend the volume.
Now, this doesn't always work, and I'll explain why in a moment.
But the trick is select the amount
of available space you want to extend that in.
We're going to extend it into all of the available space that follows it.
We'll click finish,
and now all of a sudden, our C drive is twice as big as it was.
Right? We were down to our three partitions,
the system partition up front, the C drive, which is now nice and big,
and then this recovery partition at the end.
Now, I see that this doesn't always work
because what we just looked at was the ideal scenario.
The free space that we had available to us
happened to be located immediately following the C drive.
If that's not the case,
then the Windows partition tool may not work, may not do what you need it to do.
However, there are partition tools out
there that will allow you to move partitions around so that if you've got
free space, but there's something in the way another partition is perhaps
between the sea partition and the free space.
These tools will allow you to maneuver things, to move things around so that you
can actually get that free space, butt it up against the end of the C
partition, and then have that be something you can then extend the C partition into.
But that's beyond the scope of what I'm going to talk about today.
It's just I want you to know that those
tools are available if you find yourself in that situation.
The other question that comes up
and that I am going to address here are these other partitions.
We've got this system partition up front,
and we've got this recovery partition up back.
Can't I use that space?
The answer, of course, is yes and no.
Those partitions exist for a reason.
In this example, I believe the system partition.
Yeah, that's part of the boot process.
It's part of what's required for this particular machine to be able to boot.
If it were gone, would it still boot?
Not sure, probably, but I'm not sure.
For 580 megabytes, it's not worth me risking it.
The other one, the recovery partition, is a little bit clearer.
That is in all likelihood, a complete copy of Windows ready to be reinstalled.
In other words, it's the replacement for installation media that we used to have.
When you do a reset your PC in Windows,
all it really needs to do then is copy the information from this recovery
partition into the main partition that you're basically recovering.
The bottom line there is that that's kind of sort of optional.
If that recovery partition doesn't exist,
you won't be able to do that function, at least not as easily.
What you may need to do instead is have Windows installation media.
But again, at 560 megabytes, it's just not that big a deal.
And in this case, yeah, I'm going to leave it there.
It's not going to get me that much more space.
If I were to delete it and incorporate that space into the C drive.
If there's ever a question, if there's a partition that you don't
understand on your hard disk, leave it alone.
Don't delete it.
Only delete the partitions that contain
the data you know of that you can control, that you can back up and restore.
That way, you'll never accidentally do something bad to your system.
And along those lines, one of the things you can always do if you
feel the need to experiment is to take a complete system image backup.
What that will do is it will back up all of the partitions on this hard drive.
You could play to your heart's content and see what works and what doesn't work.
And when you find something that doesn't
work, you restore that system image backup and now all of a sudden all those
partitions came back the way they were set up initially.
So do take a system image backup.
First focus on the big partitions,
the data partitions, and if you can, if you need to, maybe use a third party
tool to move them around so that they'll be adjacent to the partition that you want
to allow to grow into and use the additional space that you might free up.
That was kind of a long convoluted answer
I wanted to show you and talk about some of the issues that were involved
but the bottom line is really no, you can't just delete a partition
magically have its data not be deleted, it's going to be deleted.
The way to do that is to copy that data somewhere else, delete the partition,
make the more space wherever you need, the more space and then copy your data back.
That way you won't lose a thing.
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I'm Leo Notenboom and this is Ask Leo.com. Thanks for watching.