Can't extend partition to use free space

Question

On my Windows 10 drive I have the following partitions

How can I extend the C partition so that it uses the (Extended) "Free space" partition?

The extend option is greyed out when right clicking the C partition

Deleting the free partition gives the following error

There is not enough space available on the disk(s) to complete this operation

Solution 1

What you need to do is following.

1. Delete the 52 GiB logical drive.
2. Delete the underlying extended partition.
3. Move the 450 MiB partition to the end of the available disk space.
4. Extend the 88 GiB volume to whatever length you need.

Note! In order to complete step 3 you will have to use another tool, because Disk Manager in Windows doesn't understand what it means to move a disk partition/volume. I don't think Microsoft has made any improvements to the Disk Management tool since they acquired the technology some 20 years ago from Veritas Software. Ability to move partitions has been on the wish list of Windows users ever since.

Fortunately, there are some third party software you can use.

• AOMEI Partition Assistant
• Acronis Disk Director
• GNOME Partition Editor

I am personally a long time Acronis DD user and I can assure you that it's one of the best, if not the best partitioning tool available for Windows. It's so good that I have it installed on every one of my Windows PCs.

(Make sure to use version 12 on Windows 10, as the previous version has some trivial issue due to a storage related change that was made to Windows 10 which broke the compatibility. It causes the program to fail on detecting and displaying a list of drives, which makes it useless. So basically, use version 11 on anything from Win XP to Win 8.1, but for Win 10 and up, only use version 12 or higher.)

The AOMEI partitioner has the benefit of having a light, freeware version. The Acronis partitioner does not.

Also, do not forget to check out Gparted. Aside from being full featured, free as in "freedom of speech", it also supports all common partitioning schemes, and plenty of file systems, including the latest NTFS. If you know how to create a bootable DVD or UFD, then you should know how to make Gparted operational on your PC.

Solution 2

Partitions must be contiguous. As you have another partition in between, you cannot extend C: to that free space.

Solution 3

"The "Extend Volume" option is grayed out by using Disk Management in Windows 7. the reason is that there is another volume between system volume and unallocated space. What's more, there is no option for moving volume."

This limitation applies to W8 and W10 as well.

Source

Comments

[DavidPostill]

You can't without first moving the 450 MB partition into the free space.

[Иван Светушков]

@DavidPostill How do I do that?

[Moab]

Contiguous and to the right when expanding the C partition with the built in Windows disk management

[Samir]

This "chunk" of "space" is exactly what a partition is! Partitioning is a way to segmentize data. Partitions are clearly defined as the addressable memory space or range between two endpoints (a.k.a. boundaries).

[Samir]

The difficulty in this example lies in realizing that an extended partition is an encapsulation method. Another challenge lies in the quirky way diskmgmt presents this visually. That lime green "free space" thing is in fact an encapsulated primary partition, and yes, you can in fact delete it, just like you can delete a normal primary partition. In fact, you must delete it if you want to re-purpose the underlying disk space that's occupied by the extended partition.

[Samir]

So in this context "free space" just means that the encapsulated primary partition has no allocated data and no filesystem, not that it's not a partition. It is a partition, or a "logical drive" if you use DOS/Windows terminology.

[Samir]

I have not done this recently, but if memory (my main memory) serves me well, I believe you can in fact extend the C partition whilst running Windows off of it. But it may require a system reboot to complete the operation.