Extending Windows 7 Partitions or Volumes

Today i will show you how to extend a Windows volume. In order to do this we must open the Disk Management tool where we can resize our volumes. The following steps will walk you through this process.

1. Click on the Start Menu button in the lower left of your desktop and then click on the Control Panel menu option.
   
   
2. When the Control Panel opens, click on the System and Maintenance category.
   
   
3. When the System and Maintenance category opens, scroll down and click on Administrative Tools.
   
   
4. Double-click on the Computer Management icon. The Computer Management console will now be open. Towards the bottom you will see a category called Storage and underneath that category will be the Disk Management icon as shown below.
   

5.  Click once on the Disk Management icon and you will now be in the Disk Management utility  as shown in the figure below. From this utility you can see all the partitions on your computer and  format, delete, create, expand, or resize them. For this tutorial, I am going to expand the E: partition so that it uses up the rest of the available space on Disk 1.

6.   To expand the partition, you simply need to right click on the partition you want to work with and select the Extend option. In this example, I right click on the E: partition and in the menu that comes up I select Extend.

7.   A wizard screen will appear as shown below. Press the Next button to continue.

8.    A new screen, shown below, will appear that allows you to select the available free space on your local drives that you can use to extend the space of the selected partition. It is important to note that Windows 7 allows you to extend a volume using free space on the same drive as well as other drives. I strongly suggest that you do not extend a volume on one disk with free space from another. This is because if one of the drives has a hardware failure, then all the data on that volume will be deleted.   Instead only use the free space on a drive that contains the volume you are extending

 As discussed in step 5, for this tutorial we are going to expand my 8 GB partition (E: drive) to the full size of Disk 1 using all of its available space. As Disk 1 is the only available free space on my computer, windows 7 will automatically select it as shown in the image above and use the maximum amount available to extend the partition. If there were other drives with free space they would be shown under the Available selection. If you want to extend the volume by a lower amount you can change it in the Select the amount of space in MB: field. Otherwise we press the Next button.

 9.  You will now be presented with a confirmation screen. If you are sure you want to extend the volume, press the Finish button. Otherwise, press the Back button to make changes or the Cancel button to cancel this operation

10.  When Windows 7 has completed extending the volume, you will be back at the Disk Management screen where you will see the volume you extended with the new size. An example of this is shown below.

 

Now you can close the Computer Management window as your task is complete.