Managing the size of your partitions is always challenging. Using third party partition software has been standard for several years now. But with Windows 7 you can make some modifications to the partition without using an external third party source.

In a previous post we showed how to shrink a volume. Here we do the opposite, how to extend a volume.
We Begin with Start -> Control Panel

Click Start and then Select Control Panel

Next select System and Security

System And Security

The next step in the process is to select Administrative Tools

Administrative Tools

Select Computer Management

Computer Management

Next select the drive or partition that you want to extend or resize.

Working with the Simple Drive

On the Simple drive the New Volume (J) has 200 mb available. In order to extend drive (I) to contain the additional space, one must first delete the volume.

Delete The Volume with the space that you will use

Select Yes

Do You Want To Delete

The Volume gets deleted and the volume has an unallocated amount of disk space. You are now ready to extend the volume.

The Disk1 with a primary partition and an unallocated volume

Now select the volume to extend. In this case it is the Simple Drive. Right Click and from the Options Available follow the steps.

Select the Extend Volume Option

Follow the Wizard

Extend the Volume Wizard

The window will show what available space you can use. In this case, it is the 200 mb that was taken from the deleted volume.

Disk Space available to extend: 200mb

Completing the operation follows

Finish The Extended Volume Operation

Results: The entire primary partition has additional space.

The Extended Volume - New Size

This completes the change. It is easy and it can allow you some modification to the partition.

One other note. If you have upgraded from XP or Vista to Windows 7 there will be a Windows.old folder that you can remove to recover additional hard drive space. It is recommended that you do this before you shrink or extend your volume partition.