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I have 2 physical disks. One as C: drive, basic type, second, about 700G big disk, contains one 475G ExFat partition, and behind it there is unallocated space about 223GB

Yet if i open disk manager and try to extend the partiton on the second drive to make use of the unallocated space, extend option is greyed out.

Tried Windows /11/ disk manager, and also free EaseUS partition master, the second also allows no resize, only move the partition.

Can somene explain or point me to relevant url about this? So far i tried to take drive offline, and converted from basic to dynamic drive. In props i see its a partition with guid, disk is GPT type.

There was a NTFS partition before which i removed, and hoped to extend the ExFat. I see option to create new partition, but that not wat i want.

So far only option i see is I can copy out all countents of existing partiton away, then remove it and recreate a new big one.

But i still wonder why the extend option is grey. Anyone knows the answer?

screenshot

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  • try shrinking the ExFat HDD partition by 1000 bytes. You might just find after doing this it re-calculates the available space and allows you to extend the partition into the unallocated space afterwards.
    – Mastaxx
    Apr 29, 2022 at 8:09
  • @Mastaxx Shrinking is the other also greyed option in the screenshot :(
    – Peminator
    Apr 29, 2022 at 8:15
  • Apologies, i believe the problem you have is that the extend volume option in Disk Management only works to a RAW or NTFS partition. You can't extend FAT or other format partition on Windows PC. It looks like you have two options. You can try using a third party software that can do this for you, but backup your important data first! The other option is to backup your data and format the drive to NTFS, then copy the data back,
    – Mastaxx
    Apr 29, 2022 at 8:17

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Unfortunately Windows cannot extend dynamic ExFat partitions. To achieve this you will need to use a third party software like Disk Genius and such. There are many others available like EaseUS Partition Master and AOMEI Diskpart that also do the same thing. Most of these softwares start free but require payment to unlock their most useful features. It is strongly recommended you backup your data before doing this because data loss is still a risk you carry when performing this task.

The other option is to backup the drive and format it as NTFS, then copy the data back to it. This will allow you to have shrink/extend control of the drive in Windows 10.

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  • I tried EaseUS Partition Master free version, which was not able to do that. I ended up moving content to other drive, removing the partition, and aking a new one to use all space
    – Peminator
    Apr 29, 2022 at 11:09

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