There is no "safe" way to do this. You must have a full backup before you attempt to grow a partition. There are some 3rd party partition managers that will do this, but not for the faint of heart or those without backups.
Needs help in changing size of the part of the size of the hard drive of my Window 7 laptop. The resident hard drive is partitioned to C and D. Now the D drive is full and the C drive still has 60% free space. I am able to shrink the the C drive. When I try to expand the D drive, the choice in the Window Disk Management window is grey out! How can I safely expand the D drive? I have been living with the disk full message for over a year. The last thing I want to do is mess up my computer because I use it for work and storing a lot of personal data.
Thanks!
Gabriel
There is no "safe" way to do this. You must have a full backup before you attempt to grow a partition. There are some 3rd party partition managers that will do this, but not for the faint of heart or those without backups.
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does the d drive have some program or is it just unstructured data? (Likes documents)
it would be much safer to just move a few things to the c drive. If you don't know what is taking the space use something like windirstat it will do a scan for you.
If you do choose to grow it than tailchaser is 100% correct. But you should already have a good backup :P (right?)
Dropbox Basic FTW and it is free!
That way you aren't 100% dependent on one old ass hard drive on an old ass windows 7 computer to store your stuff!!
Use it as an opportunity to upgrade. SSD prices are ludicrously low, and you'll get a nice bump in performance to boot.
C
...and buy an external USB drive to back-up to. The Western Digital I bought came with automated software for unattended backups.
I tried resizing the Windows 7 C drive partition on the hard drive that came in my laptop, but I just managed to permanently lose a couple hundred gigabytes of space from the 500GB drive. I was able to shrink the C drive, but I couldn't assign the freed space to a new drive letter. So I tried to grow my C drive to reclaim that space, but that failed too.
This was a couple of years ago, and I don't recall all the details, but I think it was something like you describe with needed options being grayed out. I removed the drive from my laptop and replaced it with an SSD plus a larger hard drive, and I run Linux on it. I have the Windows disk installed in the expansion bay in my docking station, but I only use it once a year for Turbo Tax. Although now that I have a Garmin VIRB XE camera, I guess I'll be using it for VIRB Edit too.