Extend/Merge Partitions 1

[eman6]

I had this experience with VISTA and thought sharing it might help somebody.

In Control Panel/Administrative tools/Computer management/Storage/Disk Management

As you right click on a partition, there are options to shrink or extend a partition.

You want to extend partition C:\ but the option is grayed out and you wonder why.
From my experience, I concluded the following:

** You can extend a partition to an ADJACENT + UNALLOCATED partition. **

Otherwise not possible.

My experience was:
I had C: = 20 GB and D: = 445GB 20GB was too small for installing software, as I intended to use the partition for.
I tried shrinking the D and using the rest to join C but that did not work. Because the result of shrinking the D left a partition (E away from the C: (C|D|E). Then I ended up unallocating the D (which was empty anyway) and extending the C to include the D. That worked. Why? Because the partition (D I joined to the C: was:
1- Adjacent to the C:
2- Unallocated.
So if you have C: and D: and E: you cannot extend C to include E. You can extend D to include E if E is unallocated, and you can extend C to include D if D is unallocated.
So it seems that you can shrink C: to leave some space to add to the D. But if you shrink the D: you cannot add the new space to the C: because the D is between the C and the resulting extra (e.g. E which is NOT ADJACENT to the C:

Knowing that disks are round and not straight, makes this sound ridiculous, but it looks like that's the way it works.

Hope that helps.



______________________________________
Eman
Technical User

 

[strongm]

Depends if the disk is a Basic or Dynamic disk. Dynamic volumes can be extended into any space avaialable on a dynamic disk; it does not have to be contiguous.

 

[disord3r]

This is because a single partition must be composed of contiguous drive space, which is why you can combine space from adjacent partitions but not non-adjacent partitions.

It's my understand that off-the-shelf partition management programs are capable of doing this, but only because they accomplish what you did manually (rearranging data on the drive so that the free/unallocated space you wish to merge is adjacent to the partition into which you wish to merge it).