Cant extend my c drive because the option is greyed out

Xennox70

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Sep 21, 2015
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Literally what is said in the title, I cant extend my c drive because the option is greyed out
1Tna71V

not sure what to do, i've tried google but most posts seem to get nowhere.

http://imgur.com/1Tna71V

Im running windows 7 64
 
Solution
You can't, because of that small partition in between the C partition and that large unallocated space.
The two partitions need to be next to each other.

Try a partition management tool. Partition Magic, maybe.
You can extend your C: drive as follows, BUT BEFORE UNDERTAKING THESE STEPS FIRST READ MY NOTES FOLLOWING THE STEPS...

1. Using a disk-cloning program, clone the contents of your 200 MB G: partition on your 1 TB boot disk to your empty 250 GB secondary HDD (E:). (That secondary disk IS empty of data, yes?)

2. Using Disk Management, right-click on the C: partition and select the option "Mark Partition as Active"; then delete the G: partition (volume). The disk-space formerly occupied by the G: partition will then become unallocated so that the entire disk-space following your C: partition will then be unallocated.

3. Now you can continue to use Disk Management to extend your C: partition to whatever size you desire, HOWEVER, leave enough unallocated disk-space following the extension of the C: partition to accommodate that small System partition G: that you cloned to your E: drive. About 300 MB of unallocated disk-space will be more than enough.

If the disk-cloning program created a partition on the E: destination drive only sufficient enough to contain the 162 MB of data contents of that former G: partition, that will be fine.

Depending upon the disk-cloning program it's conceivable the program may have utilized the entire disk-space, i.e., 232 GB of the destination drive to contain the 162 MB of data and created a single volume (partition). If that be the case, simply shrink the partition to about 300 GB or so.

4. Clone the contents (your System data) of the E: drive to the unallocated disk-space on your 1 TB boot drive. Depending upon the disk-cloning program you use, you may have to first create a partition of that unallocated disk-space. Some disk-cloning programs by default will clone the contents of the source disk (in this situation your E: drive) to the destination drive's unallocated disk-space, thus creating a partition for the cloned contents equal to the size of the cloned contents.

5. After that System partition has been cloned back to the unallocated disk-space on the C: drive, mark that partition Active (see step 2. above).

6. Hopefully the process went well and your boot drive will boot without incident and function without any problems. And you'll have the add'l disk-space you wanted for your C: drive.

NOW, THE CAVEATS...
BEFORE undertaking any of the above steps, FIRST clone the entire contents of your source disk (the 1 TB HDD) to another disk. This, of course, is purely a safety measure in the event things go awry as a result of taking the above steps. You will be always able to recoup as long as you have that clone.

Your boot drive contains a total of about 350 GB of data so you would need a HDD recipient of the clone larger than that to contain the contents of your boot drive. I recognize this may be a problem for you since I assume you do not have another disk large enough to receive those cloned contents. I would hope you could obtain another HDD for this purpose. You probably should have another large-capacity HDD that you can utilize for future comprehensive backup purposes of your day-to-day working drive & possibly add'l storage.

Understand the preceding cautionary note is not absolutely essential. There's no reason why the undertaking of the process outlined above should cause any problems, but as we both know from previous experience that when it comes to any substantive process involving a user's modification of his/her PC system, !*0# happens. I'm quite uncomfortable with the notion of a PC user undertaking substantive modifications of his/her system (such as described here) without having a clone of the original system at hand.

Now the disk-cloning program we always employ is the Casper program - http://www/fssdev.com - a commercial program that sells for $49.99. We use that program primarily (nearly exclusively) for comprehensive backups of our systems. The program is extraordinarily fast in operation when used frequently (as it should be used). Casper does have a 15-day trial version available but it's slightly crippled as compared with the commercial version and won't have the capability of carrying out the precise disk-cloning operation I've detailed.

There are, as you probably know, a fair number of disk-cloning programs freely available on the net. I'm reasonably certain they can carry out the process I outlined above as well as the Casper program but I can't be absolutely certain about that.