just bought an Aspire XC-1660G for a friend

cucomputerguy

and when trying to restore her files from her current desktop, I found that the internal hard drive seems to be split into two partitions, System (C:) and Data (D:). And there's a 1GB Recovery Partition in between seemingly making it impossible to merge the two partitions so that I have a single C: drive.  Short of some third party software, is there any way to accomplish my goal of merging the two partitions?

AnhEZ28

@cucomputerguy you can use minitool partition wizard for merging two partitions that are separated by the Recovery partition.

AnhEZ28

@cucomputerguy you can use minitool partition wizard for merging two partitions that are separated by the Recovery partition.

StevenGen

cucomputerguy said:

and when trying to restore her files from her current desktop, I found that the internal hard drive seems to be split into two partitions, System (C:) and Data (D:). And there's a 1GB Recovery Partition in between seemingly making it impossible to merge the two partitions so that I have a single C: drive.  Short of some third party software, is there any way to accomplish my goal of merging the two partitions?

First you need to know what a recovery partition is? A recovery partition is on a boot disk that helps to restore the factory settings of the OS (operating system) if there is some kind of system failure. This partition has no drive letter, and you can use only Help in Disk Management.

The recovery partition has two varieties:

•  The first of the varieties is the most widespread and installed with the Windows operating system on a GPT disk and occupies a negligible amount of disk space.

•  The second is set by the computer manufacturer. It occupies a significant amount of disk space since it is this part of the recovery partition that contains the manufacturer settings for application drivers and other things that allow you to restore these default settings. This partition is also called the OEM section.

Have a look at this guide as this is an add for a tool to “Recovery Partition and How to Delete It on Windows!” but I take no responsibility if you stuff things up and you don’t know what you are doing, best is to backup all your valuable data before you do this as and if you make a mistake you might not be able to boot your computer.

Larryodie

Why mess with it ? Most likely factory as StevenGen says. 

cucomputerguy

To answer your question, Larryodie, I have to ask you one: do you have friends, family or clients that are so easily confused by technology that anything new or different becomes an ordeal for you to try to help them with?  That's this friend, in my case. Just one drive for downloading, saving and copying, please.
My solution was mostly due to AnhEZ28's post. I was hung up on the idea that space had to be transferred between adjacent partitions. Turns out that is not the case and I was able to transfer all of the open space directly from the D:drive Data partition to the C: Acer partition using AOMEI Partition Assistant. I lost about 6GB (smallest I could make the D:drive partition before deleting it and leaving it as Unallocated) but that is a totally acceptable loss to get to my solution - One Drive to Rule them all.
More questions to help me narrow down what I really needed to know would have been more helpful. I am perfectly aware of what a Recovery Partition is and that is why I was asking for help to work around it being between the two regular partitions. I will endeavor to be more concise with my questions in the future.

Larryodie

My bad as I was saying "WHY not leave the partition's as is ". It was probably factory created. Yes I know about helping friends and relative's. When I ran my business, they were treated as paying customers, now in retirement, I'm more lenient in donating my time. Happy Holidays, cucomputerguy.