When installing Windows Vista on my new pc some months ago I made a big mistake. I split the 1TB hd in 2 500Gb partitions. After some months, my system partition (the C-drive where Vista is installed) got full while my second partition (for me called e-drive) wasn’t even half way.
Luckily Vista has a build in partition manager so I tried to enlarge the system partition with some space of the second partition. I failed. The option was greyed out. So I tried Paragon Partition Manager (9.0 professional edition) but also this pay-for software was not able to extend the size of my c-drive.
Then I found a site from a guy named Walker. He describes that a system partition can only be extended if there physically is some space unassigned to a drive directly after the system partition itself.
- So I shrank my e-drive in half. This results in the latter part being available. But this is directly after the e-drive. Not after the c-drive.
- Next step therefore was to create a new partition. I assigned it the letter G.
- I moved all data on e to g
- I removed the e-drive. This resulted in the space getting available directly after the C-drive
- So I extended the system partition with the new created non-assigned space. The option was indeed not greyed out anymore
- I then moved all data on G to somewhere on my C-drive
- Removed the G-drive
- And extended the system-partition also with this unallocated space. Resulting in the complete 1 Tb hard drive as a c-drive!
A product, is specifically designed to extend system partition, it’s name “Extend Partition Home Edition”, http://www.extend-partition.com/
In Vista extending volume is no longer a difficult task, it’s possible to extend system partition by using Windows Disk management, which has inbuilt the features of extending volume and shrinking volume, and easy to use. But in Win2000/XP/2003 doesn’t support these new features. About how to extend system volume in Vista,2008,Win7, here is an instruction: http://www.extend-partition.com/extend-system-boot-partition.html, it seems Windows Vista is indeed better than WinXP/2000.
If there isn’t any unallocated space next to the C drive, Vista doesn’t allow you to extend it.
And if the C drive is FAT but not NTFS. Windows Vista doesn’t support FAT extension or shrink.
Here is a free tool help you to extend Vista C drive freely and even there is no unallocated space or the partition is FAT.
http://www.partition-tool.com/resource/resize-vista-partition.htm
It can also help you to transfer data and upgrade disk:
http://www.partition-tool.com/easeus-partition-manager/disk-copy.htm
Wow, thank you so much for posting this information. Worked perfectly for me to clean up a weird partition on a new MSI machine. Thanks again!
Thanks Leender…. It worked for me…
Actually, yes I do but unfortunately my problem still isn’t solved :sigh:
I’ve no idea how you got this to work.