Extend my C drive space in Windows 8

Hi JayFeng,

Thank you for posting in Microsoft community!

What happens when you try to extend the partition?

How many drives do you have on your computer?

Do you have enough space in other drives?

Follow the steps on how to Resize a Partition.

a. Press Windows key + C on your keyboard to show the Charms bar.

b. Click on search.

c. Click settings.

d. Now type Partition in the search option.

e. Click on Create and format hard disk partitions.

f. In the Disk Management screen, just right-click on the partition that you want to shrink except c:/, and select “Shrink Volume” from the menu

g. In the Shrink dialog, you will want to enter the amount you want to shrink by, not the new size. For example, if you want to shrink your 50gb partition by roughly 10gb so that it will now be roughly 40gb, enter 10000 into the box.

h. Right-click on the partition that you want to shrink, and select “Extend Volume” from the menu.

i. Click ok and restart the computer.

Note that the extend partition feature only works with contiguous space.

Let us know if you are able to perform these steps. I will be glad to provide you with the additional options available that you can utilize to get the issue resolved.

Hi

I also have the same issue, but the above does not work, my configuration is 47gb Health, 10gb Recovery, 155GB C drive, 133GM unallocated. I want to merge the unallocated with the C drive.

Can you help?

Same with me ... C: drive partition cannot be extended. The 'extend' option is always greyed out for C:

The 'extend' option is always grey-ed out for my C:

Kindly help

This is because drive can only be extended to the left.. the resulting drive must be contiguous on your disk. You cannot extend by leapfrogging over a space that is already taken with another partition!

There is a (somewhat tedious) workaround which involves no additional software, in which I am assuming:

a) Your C drive is the Operating (booting) drive, and is in the leftmost position.

b) You have only files in the other partitions, ie not whole operating systems.

c) You have significant free space on your drive to play with and no rediculously sized files that fill entire drives.

What you need to do essentially is move the unallocated space over to the right hand side of the drive you want to extend. The extend option will then be available.

To do this, you need to shrink the partition that is currently there down to the size you wish to extend by, and then MOVE THE DATA IN IT ESLEWHERE! This is the tedious part.

You can then delete the empty partition and extend the C drive into the unallocated space.

Similar shrink, copy, paste, extend operations can be carried out to get the remaining drives where you want them. Labourious, yes, but worth it to get your structure the way you want. Reminds me a bit of the old Tower of Hanoi game you used to see on mobile phones in the old days...

Word of caution: you may need to move the recovery partition and I am not sure whether the result will still work. Windows 8 is pretty good at working out these issues though, and you can always wipe and re-make the recovery.

Oh, and one last point: Measure twice, cut once!