Two hard drives... Merging them onto ONE of the drives. Long read.

[agathodaimon]

I have someone who has two hard drives. Drive A (the large one) and Drive B (the small one).

The operating system & some applications are installed on B. He wants to get everything put onto A (including the OS), but A currently has data & apps on it already that he doesn't want to lose.

His goal is to only have one drive, and get rid of drive B, since it's older & slower.

Is this possible? (for free)

 

[RebateMonger]

You didn't give any disk sizes or data sizes, which might affect the answer.

Offhand, though, I don't see any solution other than moving a bunch of data to a third hard drive. I'd get a third drive (C) and copy everyting to it. This third drive should be bigger than A.

Then I'd clone B onto A using the diskmaker's cloning utility. Then copy whatever is missing to A, also.

Now use C as a backup disk to make periodic backups, preferably image backups so it's easy to restore the PC in case of disk failure or malware infection.

If there are other PCs available, you could also copy the data from A to those across a network connection.