Extending the C volume

So my girlfriend recently got a laptop with a single 600GB HDD in it. Which is plenty of space, except that Dell determined that the C: drive should be 58GB and the rest should be the

drive.

Well we all know that 60GB doesn't take very long to use up, and even with me telling her to save everything to D it has inevitably happened. No biggy, I decreased the

drive by 40GB but was still unable to extend (because it was not continuous space).

So I shrunk the

drive down to 40GB and used the rest to create the F: drive. I copied the contents of

to F: and deleted

. Now even though the C: and formerly

drives are continuous, why can I still not expand?

Is it because C: is the system/boot drive or is it because I am not using a dynamic disk? What do you guys think would be the easiest way to do this? I know there are 3rd party tools that are supposed to work better than Windows, but I have never used any.

Thanks

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Comments

Essendon

I havent used it myself, but I hear that PartitionMagic is the tool that you want. I always thought you couldnt extend the system volume till I read this article. The guy claims to have done it in XP Pro.

EDIT: If you have 7 on the machine, people recommend GPARTED.

Devilsbane

Essendon wrote: »

I havent used it myself, but I hear that PartitionMagic is the tool that you want. I always thought you couldnt extend the system volume till I read this article. The guy claims to have done it in XP Pro.

EDIT: If you have 7 on the machine, people recommend GPARTED.

Yep, it is windows 7, Home edition I believe. I'll take a look at that link

Mojo_666

I have done this OK with Pro and Enterprise, so it is possible, it might be a limitation of home but I am guessing that if you have the option you should be able to do it?, how far far you get with the process?

Hyper-Me

I dont think you can extend the system partition while its active (booted into it).

Do you have a Windows 7 install disc or Winpe flash drive? Boot into one of those, get to command line and you can extend the partition using DISKPART. It's command line though, but that shouldnt be any big deal.

Mojo_666

Hyper-Me wrote: »

I dont think you can extend the system partition while its active (booted into it).

Yes you can, you can extend and shrink volumes as you please and it does it nativly, as does vista and server 2008.

It is all done through Disk Manager.

How To Shrink & Extend A Partition (Volume) In Windows 7

ajs1976

Mojo_666 wrote: »

Yes you can, you can extend and shrink volumes as you please and it does it nativly, as does vista and server 2008.

It is all done through Disk Manager.

How To Shrink & Extend A Partition (Volume) In Windows 7

This article has a little more detail and reference the past limitations and extending C:\.

Extend System Partition in Windows 7

Hyper-Me

Mojo_666 wrote: »

Yes you can, you can extend and shrink volumes as you please and it does it nativly, as does vista and server 2008.

It is all done through Disk Manager.

How To Shrink & Extend A Partition (Volume) In Windows 7

Well heck.

I was sure it blocked me once when i tried to do it while booted into the OS.

Mojo_666

Hyper-Me wrote: »

Well heck.

I was sure it blocked me once when i tried to do it while booted into the OS.

This can happen when shrinking the volume, at least on vista it did, and the solution was using thrid party defrag tools which could take care of system files.

Devilsbane

I was able to shrink and expand the D partition. And I could shrink the C partition, but the expand option is grayed out and I'm not sure why. If it can be shrunk why can't it be expanded?

Mojo_666

Devilsbane wrote: »

I was able to shrink and expand the D partition. And I could shrink the C partition, but the expand option is grayed out and I'm not sure why. If it can be shrunk why can't it be expanded?

Is the contiguous space next to it which you wish to extend on to "unallocated" ?

Devilsbane

Yep. It goes c: unallocated and then

Maybe it needs a restart after I made the space to the right unallocated?

Mojo_666

Devilsbane wrote: »

Yep. It goes c: unallocated and then Maybe it needs a restart after I made the space to the right unallocated?

Possibly, there is no harm in trying, if that does not work might be worth playing about with that space, create a partition or 2 delete it etc.

thenjduke

Home is your limitation. Pro and Ultimate is no problem.

Devilsbane

thenjduke wrote: »

Home is your limitation. Pro and Ultimate is no problem.

Dumb thing. (but in MS defense, a typical home user would have no idea that it is possible to increase the size of a partition).

I downloaded a live cd last night. Maybe I can try it out after my class tonight. How much danger would you think there is in doing this? Should I do a full C: backup?

Michael.J.Palmer

This is weird... I've got Home Premium on my laptop and home computer and have shrunk partitions to make room for a new partition and then deleted that partition and extended the original back into it's place without any problem.

If you've deleted the partition it'll show up as "Unallocated Space", just simply right click the C: partition and click "Extend Volume" (all of this is done in disk management of course) and the wizard will automatically set itself to let you extend the maximum amount of space (should be equal to the amount of unallocated space) and just finish the extension process follow the wizard and you should be able to extend it.

Most of the computer management features that weren't usable in home editions of XP are usable in home editions of Win7, just try it and see what happens. If it still doesn't work then it might be a Home Basic/Home Premium difference depending on whether you have Home Basic or not.

Devilsbane

She has windows 7 home premium (did they even make a windows 7 home basic??)

The option is there to extend, it is just grayed out for C:

earweed

Devilsbane wrote: »

She has windows 7 home premium (did they even make a windows 7 home basic??)

The option is there to extend, it is just grayed out for C:

Yeah they have a home basic as well as a starter edition. I've seen the starter on a few netbooks on sale at Wal-Mart.

Hyper-Me

If its greyed out, try it with the diskpart command line

dynamik

Post a screen cap of disk management. Page file, restore points, etc. may be preventing you from modifying the partition.

Devilsbane

earweed wrote: »

Yeah they have a home basic as well as a starter edition. I've seen the starter on a few netbooks on sale at Wal-Mart.

The starter edition is used almost exclusively for netbooks. I don't think I have ever seen it on a notebook.

Windows 7 Home Basic
Windows 7 Home Basic is available in emerging markets such as Brazil, the People's Republic of China, Colombia, India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Mexico, Russia, Thailand, and Turkey.[14] It is not available in first world countries including Western and Central Europe, North America, Hong Kong, Australia and Saudi Arabia.[14] Some Aero options are excluded along with several new features.[14] Home Basic, along with other editions sold in emerging markets, include geographical activation restriction, which requires users to activate Windows within a certain region or country.[15]

There is a windows 7 basic, it just isn't available to first world countries.

Windows 7 editions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I didn't get a chance to play with it last night. I got home late and she was busy watching her shows and wouldn't give it up. I'll see if I can get my hands on it tonight.

Michael.J.Palmer

I just want to follow up on this, I'm sure you do, but it never hurts to ask those stupid questions as things might just trigger up stairs on something else as you read.

You do have unallocated space showing in disk management right?

If not, you have deleted the partition you wish to extend into right? (To do so just right click and then click delete partition).

I just can't see why it'd be grayed out for you, even with page file settings and all, unallocated space on a HDD is just empty space that you should be able to extend to. The only other thing I can think of is if that unallocated space contains some bad sectors or something and because of that it won't let you extend, but even then, I'd imagine that the option would be there for you to extend, you'd just get an error while it tried to complete the process.

Just weird stuff,

Devilsbane

Yes, there is now a chunck of unallocated space between C: and

There shouldn't be any bad sectors yet, this computer is only about 6 months old. Even if there was, that space was just previously used for storage. I could see it causing an error if bad sectors but the option should be available to try.

Michael.J.Palmer

I got another stupid question, are you trying to extend into a separate HDD?

Hyper-Me

psst.....command line.

Devilsbane

I figured it out. I deleted the volume but rather than becoming unallocated, it became free space.

Apparently Dell didn't make it a primary partition and I'm not sure how I can convert it back.

diskmgmt.jpg

Devilsbane

I think I'll have to completely delete

and then I should be able to reformat. Why would dell create an extended partition? It isn't needed.

Hyper-Me

My word, is that one disk cut up enough?

Its in an extended partition because you can't have more than 4 primary partitions on a single disk, so there is an extended partition there to house additional logical partitions.

Devilsbane

Hyper-Me wrote: »

My word, is that one disk cut up enough?

Its in an extended partition because you can't have more than 4 primary partitions on a single disk, so there is an extended partition there to house additional logical partitions.

And there only were 4. The 100mb junk one, the recovery, C:, and then

Problem solved. Delete the extended partition to get unallocatedspace, and then extend C:. Well, not quite that easy, had to take the page file off D so I could delete it, and back up the files of course. She decided she just wanted one large drive. And so thats what she got, even though I opposed it.

Thanks for all of the help and suggestions.

diskmgmt2.jpg

Hyper-Me

multiple volumes offers little benefit when they all reside on the same disk anyway.

Devilsbane

Hyper-Me wrote: »

multiple volumes offers little benefit when they all reside on the same disk anyway.

What I thought was funny was that the page file was setup on the

volume. Isn't the point of using multiple volumes so that all of the heavily used files are located near the same physical location? So wouldn't putting the page file on the other partition kind of undo that benefit?