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I want to extend my Windows partition (Windows 7), but the Extend Partition button is greyed out. Only shrinking is available. I have 7.33 GB unallocated, and I wish to extend the C: partition, which is quite small (29.2 GB). Any help for extending the system partition?

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    A screenshot of your current partitions would be helpful to understand your question. If you are unable to extend the partition there is a very good reason. Please do not try to force it to happen otherwise you will end up like this person.
    – Ramhound
    Jan 26, 2016 at 18:00
  • Using disk management you can only extend a partition to the right of that partition, you will have to use 3rd party software to extend a partition where there is no free space to the right of the partition as shown in disk management.
    – Moab
    Jan 27, 2016 at 21:08

2 Answers 2

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The option to extend the system partition in disk management control panel will be grayed out if the unallocated space is not contiguous--that is, the byte ranges are separated by other partitions, often a recovery partition or similar.

You can get around this limitation by using partition management software such as Gparted. However, there is some risk involved and it should not be attempted on primary systems where you can't afford downtime. See this thread for more details if you want to attempt it.

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I would point out that partitioning is never a 100% safe activity. It's always a good idea to have a backup of your entire drive before engaging in any form of partitioning, not that most people actually do it.

When you are unable to make changes to partitions, using Disk Management below.

1 GParted

One of the more advanced options for resizing your Windows partition, the great linux utility for managing partitions. Download http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

Here is a very detailed tutorial to extend the partition.

2 EaseUS Partition Master

It allows users to Resize/Move Partition, Extend System Drive, Copy Disk & Partition, Merge Partition, Convert Dynamic Disk, convert MBR disk to GPT disk and more.

Here is Extend Windows 7 System Partition by Easeus.

If you do not want to download any program, there is another way.

3 Command line

Click Start and type CMD, right-click CMD and select “Run as Administrator”.

In the command prompt type

Diskpart

Select the right disk drive and partition to work on. Typically, in Windows 7, this should be disk 0 and partition 2.

List disk

Select disk 0

List partition

Select partition 2

When the right disk and partitions were selected, run the EXTEND command.

Extend size=***

If ** is 500, the above command will extend the partition by 500 MB.

Extend

The above command will extend the partition by using all of the contiguous space available on that disk.

You must now exit DISKPART by using the Exit command.

Exit

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  • using your diskpart solution could make him create overlapping partitions? if he's lucky he'll get a warning at most.
    – jiggunjer
    Jan 28, 2016 at 6:37

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