Partitioning is a process of splitting the hard drive memory into one or more logical units referred to as partitions. Before installing an OS your hard drive must be partitioned i.e. it makes your hard drive ready to accept your data. You can easily re-size the partition size that is you can extend or shrink the size of your partition easily when needed.
You have a hard drive with two partitions, one of which has OS installed and the other contains data. Over time, you may run out of memory for the OS partition, due to excessive data storage. In such cases, if you have to store new data on this partition, you might have to increase the size of your OS partition and shrink the other partition. So, now you will have to extend your partition, that too without any data loss.
In order to extend your partition, here are a few simple steps that you have to follow:
- Go to My Computer, right-click on it, and then select Manage
- You will view a console tree, then click on Disk Management
- Re-sizing involves either extending the size or shrinking it. Here you need to extend the Partition size, to do this; there should be enough unallocated space available. Make sure, the space is there. If not, then you need either delete the other partition or shrink it based on your requirement.
- If there is enough space, then go to Step 7. In case you don’t have enough space and wish to delete the other partition Go to Step 5 or else to shrink the partition size go to Step 6.
- To delete a partition, right-click on the partition that needs to be deleted and choose the “Delete Volume” option. Confirm this action, by clicking “Yes”. You may receive confirmation messages and warning messages to take data backup, act according to the instructions received and take the data backup and go to Step 7
- In case you wish to shrink then, right click on that partition and select the “Shrink Volume” option, if there is space, you will be able to view the amount of space available on that partition. Now, enter the space to shrink and press the “Shrink” button
- Now, right-click on the partition to be extended and choose the “Extend Volume” option.
- Just follow the steps provided in the Extend Volume Wizard, it’s just clicking the appropriate option
- Type the amount of space that needs to be increased by “Select the amount of space in MB:” and then press “Next”.
And now, your partition size will be increased. Just restart your computer.
Important Note: Different OS will follow different steps to accomplish this. these steps are intended for Windows Vista and above versions. In the case of Windows XP and the earlier versions, there is no inbuilt feature, you need to use some third-party tools to re-size the partition.
Before expanding or shrinking your partition, remember, that these operations will cut off certain parts from one partition. When shrinking or expanding a volume you must have empty space on the drive. The partition consists of many blocks of data starting from one sector and ending with another. Some of the blocks may contain data and others are just empty. When you re-size your partition, certain blocks will be removed from either end. If those blocks contain data, you will lose your data for sure.
Hence, do not try re-sizing your partition, unless the sectors are empty. Also, make sure you take data backup and save it in a separate drive or device. But some uncertainties may occur in this process, due to which you may lose your data and have forgotten to take the data backup. When you encounter such unavoidable situations, just use Remo Recover Windows tool and recover your partition data within a few minutes.
Remo Recover is one of the best partition recovery software that can recover more than 500 file formats with ease. Moreover, this tool works smoothly on various storage devices like Hard Drives, SSDs, SD Cards, USB Drives, etc.
Warning: When you extend a partition, you will have to delete or cut off certain data from the other partition. Hence, it’s always better to take data back up before re-sizing your partitions.
