Before we start, please run Partition Expert and check what the disk map looks like in the main window, does it contain unallocated space or not
Our purpose of this guide is to resize C Drive, extend the system partition, to be more precisely, while D Drive and E Drive, or other drive on the disk has plenty of free space (partitions on the same disk, our tool is not able to extend partition with free space from other disk, actually, none of the Partition Managers is capable of doing this), we need to increase C Drive with free space from other partition, no matter when there’s unallocated space on the disk or not
There are many ways of to resize a partition on a disk without unallocated space, you can just pick the simplest one (the first one) from the list below:
Partition Extender is specially designed for partition extending, well, like it’s name indicates, it’s not an all-in-one partition manager, but it’s quite enough for us to enlarge a partition without data loss
In Partition Extender, we click on C Drive and click ‘Next’, then drag the handler at the end of C drive, you can see D Drive is decreasing while C Drive is increasing, dead simple, right? Then Click on ‘OK’ to confirm
This is the recommended methods for most of the users, we don’t need to create unallocated space and move it next to C Drive, and finally, extend it (in fact, we’ll do that in Partition Expert)
Partition Expert is the alternative to Windows Disk Management, it’s full functional, and has more than just to resize a partition, but that’s the very function we’re going to use in this example, we’ll extend C Drive in a conventional way
Firstly, click on a partition without enough free space, D or E Drive, I’ll use free space from E Drive, so, click on it and choose the ‘Resize/Move Volume’ function from the sidebar on the left, then in the opened window, we’ll drag the handle at the left side to shrink this volume, and stop dragging when you cut enough free space from it, you can preview the operation in the mini disk map at the bottom of the window, which turns to be:
It’s the same effect if you drag the handle on the right side and drag move unallocated space ahead, no difference to Partition Expert, same operating speed, we drag the header handle just because it’s easy to understand
Now we can click on D Drive and click the function ‘Resize/Move Volume’ again, but this time in the resize window, we don’t drag any handlers, we drag the entire D Drive to the end of the bar instead, hover on D Drive and when the mouse turns to cross-arrow, the partition is draggable, still we can preview the effect, click ‘OK’ to close this window once the disk map goes like:
Then, finally, we can click on C Drive and extend it with the same operation by clicking on ‘Resize/Move Volume’, and you guessed it, drag the handler on the right to the end, you can see that the unallocated space is merged into C Drive in the preview section, click OK and click ‘Commit’ to increase C Drive for real
Those steps may seem too much and complicate, but they’re not, long description doesn’t mean long operating time, it’s still fast and faster than other partition managers, 10GB free space extending may only take minutes to complete
Besides the above mentioned two methods, we can directly merge two partitions into one to take the full advantage of free space, this method is quick and useful when you have many partitions on the disk and the partition with free space is at the end of the disk, say, for example, like the disk below:
We can click on H Drive and choose the function ‘Merge Volume’, but that’s not the best practice, since after merged, there will be a folder with the name ‘H Drive’ in the C Drive’s root directory, we don’t want to store non-system related data on C Drive, so instead of merging the entire G Drive with data to C Drive, we can merge an empty folder to system drive instead. So we shrink G Drive first
Can we click on G Drive and choose ‘Resize/Move Volume’ and drag the right-side handle to the left and unallocated space is created at the same time, click ‘OK’ to exit this window, and in the main window we click on the unallocated space, click ‘Create Volume’ and click ‘OK’ to use the default setting to create a volume, now we can click ‘Merge Volume’ and merge this empty partition to C Drive. After it’s done, we can press Windows Key + E to open File Explorer and open C Drive and delete the empty merged folder, is that possiable?
No, sorry, that's not going to work, since the Merge Volume function can only be used on two adjacent partitions, if you click on G Drive, you can merge it to F or H drive, not C Drive...
When unallocated space is there on the disk, we can use also use the 3 methods above, but Partition Extender is still the best option, steps are the same, you just drag the handle on the right side and it will firstly merge unallocated space at end of D Drive and then use free space in D Drive if you keep dragging, the preview may looks like this:
Those three methods can be used in different situations and disk maps, choose the one that best suits you, if your disk map is none of the above mentioned and you have no idea how to extend a single volume, just feel free to contact us with a screenshot of the the disk map in Partition Expert or Partition Extender, anyway, you get to point, we’ll try to provide the best solution for your hard drive