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Extending the C Partition

(8 posts)
  • Started 3 years ago by drifta
  • Latest reply from drifta
  • Topic Viewed 1631 times

drifta
drifta
Posts: 446

when windows 7 1st came out i decided to do a dual boot and test it out. i gave the win 7 partiton 25GB of space and left the remaining space in my other partition. when trying to install a game recently i discovered i am out of hdd space and so i set about extending my hdd space by 1st shrinking the d drive and then set about increasing the c drive. however the extend partion bit is greyed out and wont allow me to extended my c drive. i have read many of the other posts with a similar issue and came across one post which suggested that i used the gparted live cd. when i looked at the gparted cd it said something about not changing anything with the partition with the main OS on or else i will be up for some trouble.

i was wondering if there are any other programs that i can use to increase my c drive partition.

as in all the other cases i have come across my unallocated space is to the left of my c drive and i have made the maximum number of partions that windows 7 will allow on one hdd.

is there any hope?

Thanx in advance
Drifta

Posted 3 years ago #
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ScottW
ScottW
Posts: 6609

Drifta, lately I have been recommending the freeware Windows partition managers, EASEUS Partition Master Home and Paragon Partition Manager Express. I'm surprised they didn't turn up in your search.

Be sure to back up all your important data before doing a partition move. One or both of these programs should allow you to move the C partition to the left, in the drive map, freeing up the unallocated space to the right of it and allowing it to be extended.

Posted 3 years ago #
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drifta
drifta
Posts: 446

hmm..ill give those programs a shot. i might have used the wrong keywords in the search. i was finding this really old stuff of when there were no compatible partition managers with vista/7

thanx again.

EDIT: it seems i cant use any of the programs because i am running 64bit windows 7 not 32... any other ideas?

Posted 3 years ago #
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LH
LH
Posts: 20002

Searching is an art/skill in itself :)

Posted 3 years ago #
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drifta
drifta
Posts: 446

haha yeah..i think they should create a degree in that field...it is definitely a challange.

Posted 3 years ago #
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ScottW
ScottW
Posts: 6609

I need to start saying that only the 32-bit versions of those programs are freeware. There are a couple of ways for you to proceed.

If you backup your entire C partition with some drive imaging software, you can then delete the partition, re-create it where you want, and restore the drive image. The thing to be cautious about here is that the Active partition and the System partition remain the same or you could end up with the "BOOTMGR is missing" error.

Since you can't delete and re-create the C partition while it is mounted, this operation has to be done from a Recovery or Pre-install environment. This give me an idea for a possible workaround. If you boot into a 32-bit PE, you might be able to run the freeware partition manager software! That would be a neat trick -- I may have to try that myself.

Meanwhile, please post a screen shot of your Disk Management screen. Maybe it will tell us something.

Posted 3 years ago #
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ScottW
ScottW
Posts: 6609

I booted up my UBCD4win disc to see about installing one of those freeware partition managers. Well, it turns out that the latest UBCD4win image already has EASEUS Partition Master installed on it! It's not the most recent version of Partition Master, but it has all of the features needed. It will resize and move partitions. So if you have, or can build, a UBCD4win disc then you can use Partition Master with a friendly graphical interface to move partitions.

Posted 3 years ago #
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drifta
drifta
Posts: 446

i got myself a copy of paragon partition magic 10 server and used it to expand the size of my c drive. all things proceeded well up untill where it needed to reboot to continue increasing the size of the c drive partition. something went wrong and it didnt allow me to boot back into windows 7. i kept getting a startup recovery error and my windows 7 installation changed to windows 7 (recovered)

i used the win 7 dvd to repair the OS but this failed as well. my last option was to insert the vista hdd that i previously had but had removed from my system as i used windows 7 full time. after booting into vista i copied all the necessary files and then formatted my whole hardrive and reinstalled windows 7

i no longer have a screenshot to the disk management screen however the configuration was something liek this:
(55mb OEM) (10gb recovery) (~412gb data) (25gb win 7)
and after removing some space from the data partition i had:
(55mb OEM) (10gb recovery) (~390gb data) (22gb unallocated) (25gb win 7)
installing win 7 this time i deleted the recovery parttion and tried to but failed to delete the OEM partion and installed win 7 on 265gb and created a 200gb partion for backup. this should be plenty of space for all my programs and games to be installed in and also gives me the opportunity to increase the win 7 space by deleteing the backup partiion in the future; if needed.

ill go ahead and creeate a UBCD4win anyways as it may be handy in the future. i also purchased norton ghost as i have had to reisntall windows (vista/7) a few times in as many weeks and am tired of doing so.

Posted 3 years ago #
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