Why are two different hard drives listed as one disk in Disk Management?

I feel like there's something going wrong with my hard drives on my computer... Yesterday two I use for storage (M: and H:) stopped working altogether. Today they came back and seem fine, but now I just noticed that they're listed as DISK 1 in Disk Management.

What's going on? Why are two different physical drives, which two different drive letters, listed under "DISK 1", and is this something I need to change?

Note: I'm not talking about my RAID array!

How to resize (enlarge) C: partition in Windows 8.1 | MiniTool, Paragon, and Disk Management all failed

ISSUE SUMMARY

Can't resize Windows 8.1 system partition to utilize unallocated drive space.

DESCRIPTION

I am having a heck of a time with this one and have been chasing this for days. I have an HP Pavilion 17 running Windows 8.1 which came with a 750GB hard drive. I researched to find out what the largest size internal hard drive my laptop would support and it turned out to be 2TB. I did further research on how to upgrade my SATA drive to a larger SATA drive (not interested in solid state SSD at this time).

Here is a quick screenshot of my current partitions:

STEPS FOR UPGRADING TO LARGER HARD DRIVE

Using this HowToGeek post I learned that I needed to do these steps:

1. Backup all my data.
2. Leave my current SATA (original) hard drive in my laptop.
3. Attach a new larger SATA drive externally.
4. Download and install a disk cloning program like Macrium Reflect.
5. Clone the internal disk to the external disk. And voila! That should be it and all should be good in the world.

SEAGATE BACKUP PLUS SLIM CONTAINS 2TB SATA HARD DRIVE

I discovered via this YouTube video that inside a Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2TB external USB3 portable hard drive is a standard 2TB SATA drive which can be used in a PS4, and presumably in an HP laptop as well.

DRIVE CLONED SUCCESSFULLY, BUT NOT USING FULL SIZE!

Well, I followed all those steps, except instead of Macrium Reflect, which was an unknown entity to me, I used MiniTool Partition Wizard 9.1 Pro. MiniTool was relatively new to me also, but I had recent success merging 6 partitions of a 4TB external hard drive together, so I decided to give it a try. I was able to clone my drive to the new one and it boots into Windows fine, but it only shows up as a 750GB partition (actually it's 5 partitions with C: being the largest/main/system one, which is exactly as it was on my original hard drive). I noticed that I had a bunch (1164.38 GB) of Unallocated space on the new drive in addition to the 5 original partitions.

NEED TO RESIZE, NOT EXTEND

At first terminology was a bugaboo for me in this sense: I tried for 3 days to do "Extend" operations with MiniTool, and through searching SO and Google, eventually figured out that I was doing the wrong operation. What I REALLY wanted to do was "Resize".

RESIZE ERRORS WITH MINITOOL PARTION WIZARD

So yesterday I used MiniTool Partition Wizard to try and resize my partition. Because my new hard drive is so large and I didn't want to wait an hour or so just to discover that the operation failed, I decided to test the plan by only using a small amount -- 27GB -- of unallocated space. That way I would know quickly whether the operation was successful or not. If it was a success, I would then go ahead and resize the C: partition using the rest of the unallocated space. But alas, it failed. The process needed to reboot the system first. Upon reboot there was a black screen with white text on it that indicated it was attempting to run the processes for resizing. Unfortunately, it quickly started throwing errors.

Here are the errors I got from MiniTool Partition Wizard (transcribed from screenshots):

=========================== Welcome to Partition Wizard ========================

Loading Engine...

Failed to load disk IO driver: Error Code:2
Loading Engine Complete.
Please wait...

Please do not turn off your computer while Partition Wizard is running.
Your computer will automatically reboot after Partition Wizard finish [sic] all
of its operations.

(1) of (1) operations...
Resize Partition
Partition Letter: C:
Partition Label: Windows
Disk Index: 1
Partition Index: 4
New Partition Starting LBA: 1615872
New Partition Size: 717656 MB

WIN32 Error Code:5

WIN32 Error Code:5

Failed to Write sectors!


Error! Failed to execute:
Resize partition
Error Code:40

NTFS file system error. Please use "Check File System" function to fix it first.


Updating system, please wait...

Failed to executive [sic] this command. Running Status Error Code:24

Press any key to restart your computer...

CHKDSK FINDS NO DISK ERRORS; NO LUCK SEARCHING GOOGLE FOR ERROR MESSAGES

Per the message I ran "Check File System" in Partition Wizard. It was just a gui wrapper for the windows "chkdsk" command. No errors. No bad sectors. Everything appeared to be fine.

Results of Check File System process:

^{(Click image to enlarge)}

Also, I was unable to find anything useful in Google about "Failed to load disk IO driver: Error Code:2" or "Win32 Error Code:5". That tells me that the error I'm getting may be relatively rare.

TRIED RESIZE WITH PARAGON PARTION MANAGER

I retried the operation 3 times, all with the same result. I read a forum post on Tom's Hardware where a user indicated that Partition Wizard is "crap", and said that Paragon is what worked for him. So, I downloaded and began to install Paragon Partition Manager 14 Free.

Paragon Partition Manager 14 required that some C++ runtimes be installed, and it installed them for me automatically. Without running Paragon, I rebooted the computer to see if those runtimes solved the problem I was having with MiniTool. They did not. Same errors.

I then tried to do the resize with Paragon, but to no avail. Paragon didn't give me any errors, but upon reboot I was able to see that my C: partition was still 673.66 GB NTFS, indicating that the resize did not take place.

ARTICLES AND POSTS READ IN RESEARCHING THE ISSUE

I've read at least 20 different articles and posts in search of finding a solution. Each one has either helped me understand a little more about why what I've tried isn't working, or has shown me another way to unsuccessfull resize my drive. Here are the top 6??? that I think are relevant. Unfortunately, none of these directly addresses (that I can tell) my specific issue.

• SuperUser | Partition Issue with Windows 8.1 Installation
• SuperUser | Shrinking/Extending partitions in Windows 8.1
• SuperUser | How to extend a Mint Linux partition on a dual boot config with Windows 8.1?
• SuperUser | Converting C:/ partition to Logical Partition
• SuperUser | Error when resizing partition
• SuperUser | How to extend C: drive

Non StackExchange-based articles:

• EightForums | How to combine two partitions on the same hard drive
• [EaseUS] Partition-Tool.com | Resize/move FAT & NTFS hard disk partition, flash drive, memory card, etc.
• [AOMEI] Disk-Partition.com | Learn to Add Unallocated Space into a Partition on Windows 8 or 8.1 with Third Party Partition Tool?

RECAP OF WHAT I'VE ALREADY TRIED

• Using MiniTool Partition Wizard, Paragon Partition Manager, and Disk Management (Windows internal) tried extending, merging, and finally resizing C: drive to use a small portion of unallocated space. All failed.

• Ran chkdisk to check for errors. Passed. No errors.

• Researched specific MiniTool Partition Wizard errors online to no avail.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance.

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i have three hard drives (and one DVD-ROM drive) in my Windows Server 2003 machine:

For some reason, Windows Disk Management seems to think i have four hard disks (and one DVD-ROM drive).

The drive that contains my valid volumes is marked as

Missing Offline, with an X icon

The new phantom disk is marked as:

Offline, with a do not enter icon.

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Unable to format disk: 'The system cannot find the file specified'

I have a USB flash drive, which I may have mucked up, so I used DISKPART's CLEAN to clean it up. I created a simple volume, and tried to format it. (This is all using Windows' disk management.) I was told The system cannot find the file specified.

So I tried using DISKPART (as an admin):

DISKPART> select volume 9

Volume 9 is the selected volume.

DISKPART> format recommended

DiskPart has encountered an error: The system cannot find the file specified.
See the System Event Log for more information.

DISKPART>

As you can see, no luck.

When I plug the drive in, the computer makes a beep noise as though it has recognised something, but nothing appears in My Computer

How can I format the disk so I can use it again?

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Is there a way to convert dynamic disk to basic without losing data on already existing partition?

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I want to extend the partition C (without losing it's content) by adding the extra free(Unallocated) space before it; but as you can see the extend is disabled;(I know that extend will be enabled when the extra space is after the main partition(the reverse of this situation))

but what now?

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I am trying to shrink a volume on Windows 7 Professional using Disk Management but get the following error:

Virtual Disk Manager

The service cannot be started, either because it is disabled or because it has no enabled devices associated with it.

The disk I am trying to shrink is not the system disk. However as stated by Disk Management it is: Active, Primary Partition.

Disk Management and Windows Explorer show different allocted sizes

I shrinked 50GB from my main bootcamp NTFS partition. After a reboot my windows explorer now shows that drive C's total size is 90GB, but the Disk Management tool in windows (and EaseUS Partition Manager) still shows 140GB (there is no unnalocated space).

How do I get my 50GB back?

Disk 0 should be 500GB:

DISKPART> list disk

  Disk ###  Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
  --------  -------------  -------  -------  ---  ---
* Disk 0    Online          465 GB      0 B

DISKPART> list partition

  Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset
  -------------  ----------------  -------  -------
  Partition 1    Primary            200 MB    512 B
  Partition 2    Primary            325 GB   200 MB
  Partition 3    Primary            619 MB   325 GB
  Partition 4    Primary            140 GB   325 GB

If I try to shrink another 100MB (maybe force a reload?) I get the following message:

The parameter is incorrect.

Partition 4 is mounted as C: but ony 90GB:

TotalCommander also shows a total of 90GB.

I've used chkdsk and EaseUS's error check with no luck.

C:\Users\JorisWin>chkdsk
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is BOOTCAMP.

WARNING!  F parameter not specified.
Running CHKDSK in read-only mode.

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)...
  187648 file records processed.
File verification completed.
  262 large file records processed.
  0 bad file records processed.
  2 EA records processed.
  66 reparse records processed.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 3)...
  259512 index entries processed.
Index verification completed.
  0 unindexed files scanned.
  0 unindexed files recovered.
CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 3)...
  187648 file SDs/SIDs processed.
Security descriptor verification completed.
  35933 data files processed.
CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal...
  37017704 USN bytes processed.
Usn Journal verification completed.
Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.

  95691775 KB total disk space.
  68771188 KB in 139744 files.
     85044 KB in 35934 indexes.
         0 KB in bad sectors.
    293491 KB in use by the system.
     65536 KB occupied by the log file.
  26542052 KB available on disk.

      4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
  23922943 total allocation units on disk.
   6635513 allocation units available on disk.

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I accidentally marked my external hard drive partition as active in disk management. I meant to change the drive letter but hit the wrong button. Whoops. What are the consequences of having done that and is it possible for me to undo it? Below is a screenshot of my drives. My internal laptop HDD has C: (Windows 7 OS) and D: (extra data partition). This is regarding my other disk: Disk 1 G:

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I had Ubuntu installed in a 10 GB partition of a 120 GB hard drive on my laptop.

I then installed Windows 7 on the 110 GB partition.

Now inside Windows 7, I want to reformat the 10 GB partition and use it for Windows.

I go to Computer, Manage, Disk Management, deleted the 10 GB volumne, then choose "New Simple Volumne", all default values, but it says "There is not enough space."

How can I format and use this partition for Windows?

How can I create a partition from this free space? When I right click on the empty space, these are the options I get:

If I try to delete the free space, it tells me:

Answer:

Partition Wizard solved the problem, thanks Rogue!

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I just recieved a new laptop, and for some reason the manufacturer decided that one great C: drive and no other (user available) partitions was the way to go. I would like to have two partitions - one for OS/Program files and one for my personal data (documents, photos etc.).

I tried using the Disk Manager built into Windows7, but it doesn't work as expected. After shrinking C: to make space for the next partition available, I right-click the unallocated space and select "New simple volume...". I click "next" in all the steps of the wizard, and at the end Disk Manager still asks me if I want to create a dynamic drive. My previous experience with dynamic drives tells me this is a really bad idea, so I say no, and the entire process is cancelled.

Is there a way to split the system partition in Windows7 without converting the disc to a dynamic drive?

(PS. I have seen this question, but it doesn't help as that user doesn't seem to have the same problem with dynamic drives as I do.)

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I have a 320GB hard drive currently partitioned as below:

A long time ago, a computer expert formatted my hard drive like this because I wanted to install Ubuntu. I'm now ready to do this, but I'll never need so much free space (103.09GB). I want to enlarge the D:\ volume because it already has lots of data on it.

I know that when I open diskmgmt.msc, I could possibly enlarge the D:\ volume using some free space from the unformatted 103.09GB volume, because the program offers me the option to enlarge. However I'm afraid that I might lose data doing this.

Is it possible to enlarge the partition with this Windows 7 tool or am I better using GParted via "Try Ubuntu" on my Live CD? Would either of them cause data loss in this scenario?

Cannot format 8GB USB Drive Partition

So, I have a 8GB USB thumbrive I am trying to format so I can use all 8 (or 7.27 to be exact) GB in a single partition. The drive already has a 943 MB partition, which I figured I could extend to use the full 7.27 GB but this does not seem to be the case

As you can see, the Extend volume option is greyed out.

Also notice the Delete volume is greyed out..

If I right click on the 6.35 GB volume, which is currently unallocated I get the following

All of the options are greyed out on the Unallocated volume!

What tool can I use to remove the existing partition and create a new partition that uses the entire 7.27 GB in a single volume?

What happens if an external hard drive that is part of a set of spanned discs in windows is powered off?

Does anyone know what would happen if an external hard drive that was part of a set of spanned discs was powered off whilst the computer was running? Also what would happen if it was turned off before the computer booted and windows couldn't find it?

Would the whole virtual drive just disappear from my computer and re-appear again afterwards when all the discs are available or would it break it?

I'm using windows 7 ultimate.

Thanks.