How to Shrink or Extend Your Existing Hard Disk Partition Volume

Last Updated: December 20, 2018

Hello friends, today we will show you how to extend or shrink your existing HARD DISK partition. Sometimes it is needed to extend and specific partition and if spaces are available in other drives shrinking is possible. You could also shrink volume with almost similar steps.

Steps

1
First Click "CONTROL PANEL"
2
Type the word "Partition" in the search Box

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3
Under Administrative Section "Create and format Hard Disk partition"
4
Disk Management window will come and then select the Disk drive your want to "shrink", look the present disk volume
5
Right click on the DRIVE and click "Shrink"
6
In the window enter the amount of space in MB you want to shrink
7
Click "Shrink"
8
Now you will see the disk volume is changed after shrink
9
Now Extend the volume of a disk drive
10
From "disk management " select the drive to extend
11
Right Click the disk drive and click "Extend" and note the current disk partition volume
12
Extend volume wizard window comes, click "next"
13
Enter the amount to be extended in MB and click Extend
14
Click "Finish" after entering the amount in MB.
15
Now you will see the disk volume is changed

Community Q&A

Question

How do I create a new drive?

Community Answer

You can't create a new drive. You can connect an external hard drive to your computer and use that like a USB, essentially.
Question

I have an E: drive partition and 30GB allocated free space available. I only have the option to 'shrink this drive'. My C: drive is full and is limiting my being able to operate my laptop. Can I expand it?

Community Answer

Try using a third party program like EaseUs Partition Manager. Or, you could just install programs and place your files in the E: drive.
Question

Do I need to copy the data before increasing the size of the partition?

Community Answer

Before you do something drastic to a hard drive, such as manipulating its partitions, that you should back up your data. Before you change the partition, you should already have had a regular backup strategy. After changing the partition, you should have a regular backup strategy. This would be a good time to implement a backup strategy. Today's hard drives and SSDs are just not reliable enough to go without backing them up. "USB 2" should not be part of your backup strategy, by the way.