Resize Windows 7 boot volume with DD11
This is a simple straightforward question. I have a boot partition of about 50 gigs on a 1TB hard drive and it is down to about 6% free space. I can't use DD10 and I seemingly can't use the built in Windows 7 storage manager tool because it refuses to resize the partition even though it now has 250 GB of unallocated space adjacent to it. I downloaded the trial of DD11 but it is too crippled for me to learn anything from it. My simple question is, can I resize the boot/system partition using DD11? If it can't perform that task I don't see much point in upgrading my old DD10. I doubt that it means anything but I will mention it anyway; my OS is Windows 7 Professional 64 bit.
Cecil
Hi MudCrab. I love that handle. I agree with you that Disk Management should be able to extend the boot volume into adjacent free space but every time I have tried to do it (right click the boot volume) I find "Extend Volume" grayed out. As for DD 10 doing it for me, I can't even get it to install in Windows 7, that's why I turned to the windows' disk management routine. If I can't resolve it here I guess I will turn to Gparted and see if I can do it there. As you can see from the attached screenshot, I don't have any problems with available disk space outside the C: partition. The free space now shown once contained an empty volume with the D: label. If worse comes to worst I can always set up the empty 1 TB drive and copy an image of C: to it but I'm stubborn and want to do what I know should be possible using the tools I have at hand.
Thanks a bunch for your reply and interest.
You can't extend a Primary partition into the Extended Partition Container's free space. You need Unallocated space.
If DD 10 or 11 won't let you directly resize the C: partition, you could try resizing the left edge of the E: partition just a bit first. Once the Extended Partition Container is out of the way, either Disk Management or DD should be able to resize the C: partition.
Another option (if the Logical partitions contain nothing important or contents can be copied off) is to delete all the Logical partitions and the Extended Partition Container, resize the C: partition, and recreate the Logical partitions.
Thanks again for your help. By now you must know that I am woefully unfamiliar with all the jargon that accompanies hard drive setup and maintenance. It never occurred to me that "free space" and "unallocated space" were totally different animals. Once you corrected me I moved or backed up all the data on the physical drive I was working with and deleted every volume except the C volume. That left me with 800+ gigs of free space in the extended partition container but it was not available to use for extending the C volume. Finally I right clicked the free space and out of frustration clicked on Delete again. I still find it strange that I had to delete each extended volume and then have to go back and delete them all at once a second time. In any case I was happy that doing so changed the free space to unallocated and from there on fixing my problem was a breeze. So much for the DM Help file saying you can't extend a boot partition. My next task now is to find a tutorial on hard drives that covers all the things that you can and can't do with them when setting up partitions.