Why extend volume grayed out and how to extend partition for free on Windows 11/10/8/7

Video Tutorial to Extend Partitions for Free

Summary

If you want to extend your partitions easily, sometimes you can merge the partition with another one which has a lot of unallocated space there. This article will show you how to use the easiest way to merge your partitions.

Andrew Wright

Updated on 12/5/2022

by Andrew Wright

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Extend volume is disabled for C drive

As you are unable to extend your C partition from disk management , one option left is to delete the partition D which is next to C drive, and create an unallocated space next to C drive. But do you really want to delete your D partition? You will lose your data from D drive.

It is not possible to move the unallocated space that you have just created to the right adjacent side of C drive from disk management tool and thus you cannot extend your C drive. Even sometimes you cannot shrink your drives as it reaches the shrink limit.

Extend volume grayed out on WindowsExtend volume grayed out on Windows

In fact, enabling extend volume in disk management can be done by deleting volume or shrinking volume.

Video - how to shrink volume and then extend volume in disk management

If your disk is more complicated and cannot be operated by the above steps, in such situations, you can use third party tools like freeware Partition Resizer Free to extend the partition without much trouble. These tools are easy to use.

Resize Partition with IM-Magic Partition Resizer FREE edition

There are many freeware tools available in the market which are capable to do things which you cannot do from disk management like moving the unallocated space and extending the drive.

IM-Magic Partition Resizer FREE edition helps you in moving,extending,shrinking and merging your disk drives. The tool does not touch and destroy your data on your hard disk. The roll-back data protection feature keeps your data safe.

Resize Partition with IM-Magic Partition Resizer FREE editionResize Partition with IM-Magic Partition Resizer FREE edition

download free windows 10 partition software

More video tutorials are on page https://www.resize-c.com/video/

The tool is simple to use and any user without much knowledge on system disk management can perform these big tasks. You can resize your drives any time. You can shrink any large drive not holding much data and allocate the space created from the drive to any drive. With this tool, moving the unallocated space next to your target drive is very easy, you just have drag and drop it next to your target drive. Resizing is also graphical, just move click and mouse right to expand and left to shrink. No need to enter the bytes that you want to shrink or increase

IM-Magic Partition Resizer Free is available for all the Windows 11/10/8/7 and Partition Resizer Server version is working for Server versions and Windows sbs.

Download for Server

Why Extend volume grayed out windows 10

The space in your C drive is getting full and you thought of extending the drive . When you go to disk management and tried for extend option you see the option disabled or grayed. Why?

It is because

  • There is no unallocated space next to your C drive
  • The volume is not ntfs file system
  • No adjacent free space
  • Disk is MBR...

You can extend any drive from disk management only when there is contiguous unallocated space available next to your target drive. That means the unallocated space which is not partitioned and does not have any drive letter is not next to your target drive. You can view your disk partitions from disk management.

You can try shrinking the drive next to your target drive and then allocate the space created to the target drive. But hold on.

The unallocated space that is created by shrinking the next drive is never on the right side of the the target drive and thus you cannot extend your drive from disk management . The unallocated partition is always created to the right of the drive from where it was shrunk and created.

For example if you want to extend your C drive and in D drive there is space available to shrink. You shrink the D drive, an unallocated space is created just next to D drive not to your C drive.

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