- Mar 15, 2014
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As a secondary HDD I installed a WD 160GB alongside the SSD (Win 7 64bit Primary) and Seagate 1TB main storage HDD.
The 160GB HDD has a full Windows XP 32bit OS installation on the first partition (Drive X 40GB) mirroring my old XP laptop and set up for manual dual boot. The whole of the rest of the 160GB HDD ie. about 120GB was partitioned as Drive Y and mainly used for data/docs backup of the XP drive and a later installed XP VM on the SSD. Everything NTFS as you would expect.
I've been running out of space on the Y drive so as I have a spare WD 320GB in an external USB housing I decided to clone the WD 160GB to that using EaseUS cloning tools. All went well, all appears good and I thought it would just be a simple matter to expand the Y drive to make use of the roughly 150GB unallocated space on the new 320GB HDD.
Apparently not.
Windows Disk Management > Storage tools only allow shrinking of the existing Y drive and whether I leave the 150GB new space unallocated or formatted as a Simple Volume to NTFS I don't appear to be able to expand/merge the extra empty space with the existing Y drive. I get warning message that it will mess up any boot sector on that partition. There isn't one, the XP OS installation is on the X partition but that still had me worried.
However when I proceeded there was an error message saying the Windows tools do not support this action or words to that effect.
The 'obvious' solutions are either just to create a third partition on the 320GB HDD or delete the whole Y drive partition and cloned content so I get one big unallocated space (120GB + 150GB). That can be formatted as one new partition and then it would be a simple matter of copying the files from the the original 160GB HDD Y drive partition to that.
But I'd like to know if there a correct way of expanding/merging the Y drive partition to make use of the extra empty 150GB unallocated space or a recommended tool that can do this without messing up the existing data/docs on the Y drive?
The 160GB HDD has a full Windows XP 32bit OS installation on the first partition (Drive X 40GB) mirroring my old XP laptop and set up for manual dual boot. The whole of the rest of the 160GB HDD ie. about 120GB was partitioned as Drive Y and mainly used for data/docs backup of the XP drive and a later installed XP VM on the SSD. Everything NTFS as you would expect.
I've been running out of space on the Y drive so as I have a spare WD 320GB in an external USB housing I decided to clone the WD 160GB to that using EaseUS cloning tools. All went well, all appears good and I thought it would just be a simple matter to expand the Y drive to make use of the roughly 150GB unallocated space on the new 320GB HDD.
Apparently not.
Windows Disk Management > Storage tools only allow shrinking of the existing Y drive and whether I leave the 150GB new space unallocated or formatted as a Simple Volume to NTFS I don't appear to be able to expand/merge the extra empty space with the existing Y drive. I get warning message that it will mess up any boot sector on that partition. There isn't one, the XP OS installation is on the X partition but that still had me worried.
However when I proceeded there was an error message saying the Windows tools do not support this action or words to that effect.
The 'obvious' solutions are either just to create a third partition on the 320GB HDD or delete the whole Y drive partition and cloned content so I get one big unallocated space (120GB + 150GB). That can be formatted as one new partition and then it would be a simple matter of copying the files from the the original 160GB HDD Y drive partition to that.
But I'd like to know if there a correct way of expanding/merging the Y drive partition to make use of the extra empty 150GB unallocated space or a recommended tool that can do this without messing up the existing data/docs on the Y drive?