How to make free space at the beginning of a partition?

Question

On my PC with Windows 7 I have 2 partition C and D and some reserved space.

| reserved space | C partition | D partition          | some unused space|

And I want to shrink D and then increase C like this:

| reserved space | C partition          | D partition | some unused space|

But the windows 7 disk utility shrinks D from the end because files are at the beginning and it looks like this:

| reserved space | C partition | D partition | some unused space         |

Instead of :

| reserved space | C partition |unused | D partition  | some unused space|

And I am interested how to move files away from the beginning of drive D, if possibly to move all of them to the end of the drive, so it can be possible to shrink it from the beginning.

As a lat resort I am going to delete the D drive and increase C then again create D and return the data from backup.

But it will be better if it is possible to do it without deleting the D drive.

Answer 1

I do not believe the built in partition manager has the capability of doing what you're asking for, so if you want to do it, you will need to look to third party tools. There are a number of tools that will work, but I'll just mention two that are popular.

• GParted is a partition manager that can be downloaded as a live CD, so you can manage your Windows partitions easily by popping the CD in and booting from it. It has a long history on Linux and is pretty reliable.
• MiniTool Partition Manager is a Windows partitioning tool that you can install on windows and use to manage your partitions from within Windows, like Disk Manager lets you do.

Both of these tools should have the capability of expanding the C: drive and shrinking your D: drive without you having to delete any partitions.

Answer 2

I have used this in the past for more complex partitioning tasks:

https://nl.easeus.com/partition-manager/partition-master-free.html

I would advice to stick to a partitioning tool from within windows itself, even when using multiple OS. As an example, I've once created an additional NTFS partition from outside windows and it was not possible to have simultaneously full access permissions to that partition from windows as well as from a linux system installed along it. Such problems do not occur when doing the partitioning from within windows, as windows is the most picky about access permissions.