Merge two drive partitions with an EFI system partition in between

Question

My laptop has two drives, an ssd with windows, and an hdd.

A picture of my filesystem in disk management

On my HDD, I have it split into three parts, my D drive, an EFI System partition, and empty space (in that order). I would like to add the unallocated space back onto my D drive without it being split up, but windows will no let me delete the EFI partition.

I believe this is left over from when I previously had Linux setup to dual boot from this drive. How can I re-combine these sections (I am not going to be able to back up the 700GB I currently have on this drive but unless it is important, the EFI volume can go.

Answer 1

An EFI system partition is usually the boot partition of your windows. Since it doesn't look like you currently have one on your C drive, deleting it from your D drive may make you unable to boot windows. I would recommend powering down your PC and disconnecting your D drive physically. If you are able to turn it on and load windows then you should be able to delete this partition. Unfortunately I don't think that's going to be the case for you.

To deleting the partition piece,..

Unfortunately the windows partition manager is a very limited piece of software, if you want to delete something other than your primary partitions you will need to use another product. There is supposed to be some decent free stuff out there like EaseUS partition Master and Mini Tool Partition Wizard.