Can't extend C partition. How to make unallocated space "adjacent"

Question

How do I extend my C drive?

From: Extend a Basic Volume

You can add more space to existing primary partitions and logical drives by extending them into adjacent unallocated space on the same disk. To extend a basic volume, it must be raw or formatted with the NTFS file system. You can extend a logical drive within contiguous free space in the extended partition that contains it.

I can extend my D drive, but not C. I suspect the problem is that the unallocated space is not "adjacent", but I have no clue how to change that.

How can I solve this?

Answer 1

You cannot do that with windows onboard tools.

There are various tools available that would allow you to move the D partition to the end of the free space, thereby freeing space after C, but this is a relatively dangerous operation (if you have a power failure during the move, you could loose the content of D or the whole disk), and not strictly necessary.

In your case, it's probably easier to just

• create a new partition in the free space
• move everything from D to there (turn of the page file first, and activate it again at the end of the whole operation!)
• delete D and relabel the new partition to D
• After that, you can expand C into the free space (and also the new partition, if you want it to be as large as D originally was).

(NB: on a hard disk, the space for a partition needs to be physically contiguous, on SSD's, this should be irrelevant, but that's what you get when you insist on emulating old hardware...)

Answer 2

Slightly Left field answer:

1. Create an E: drive in the currently unpartitioned space.
2. Transfer your files and folders from D: to E:
3. Delete the D drive freeing up that space.
4. Rename E: to D:
5. Extend the C: partition into the empty space now adjacent to the partition.

I'm not sure how effective this solution would be for someone with more data than you have. 30GB shouldn't take too long to move.

Answer 3

You must delete second recovery part from partitions to enable extend volume for C. Solution step by step:

1. Open cmd terminal.
2. write "diskpart" and run this command.
3. write "list disk" and run this command.
4. write "select disk 0" and run this command.
5. write "list partition" and run this command.
6. you have probably two recovery part(don't delete first recovery this is important) in this step. You must select second recovery partition. So write "select partition 5" for example.
7. You must delete second partition. Therefore write "delete partition override" and run this command. You are done! You can extend C from data partitions interface.

You can find this solution withe example from here

Answer 4

Convert the disk to a dynamic disk and it will let you extend it into the space a the end of the disk.

Just right click on Disk 0 and choose Convert to Dynamic disk. It will popup lots of warnings about not being able to boot other partitions/oses and so on. As you have the simplest of setups here you can OK them and convert.

You should then be able to extend the partition into the space at the end of the disk.

Answer 5

I had a similar issue and I used Paragon Partition Manager Community Edition to allocate some memory from my D drive to my C drive, it didn't require any backups but backups are still recommended, and it did require a reboot. Most other Partition software like EaseUS, AOEMI etc. had the partition memory allocation functionality reserved behind the premium version.

If you don't want to use any third party software, you can use the inbuilt Disk Manager in Windows, but you can only expand the C drive if there is unallocated memory to the right of it, and when you use it to shrink D drive the unallocated memory gets created to the right of the D drive so it cannot be used to expand C drive.

In this case you have to either backup the D drive, delete it and then expand C drive first and then create a new D drive from the remaining unallocated memory

or shrink D drive, create a new E drive, copy D drive content to E drive and then delete D drive to get the unallocated memory to the right side of C drive to expand it into.