How to extend an Extended Partition; leave logical volumes intact

skbaltimore, why is there some light-green narrow area between the 3 logical partitions? Is that unallocated area?
j

DiracDeBroglie said:

skbaltimore, why is there some light-green narrow area between the 3 logical partitions? Is that unallocated area?
j

Good question. I'm not sure. Maybe it's just how Windows doesn't use space efficiently, I'm not sure. But whatever it is, it's so marginal that I don't think it's going to make any difference. Maybe someone else could explain it better, though.

Window 7 sometimes does leave some space between partition. I the particular case I had it was each time 1MiB. GParted does not do that, so I partitioned my drives using GParted. Maybe you could delete your logical partitions - except for the D partition - and re-create the 2 new logical partitions using Paragon.
j

Now I noticed the green area's are uneven in width!! Very strange. Maybe, in DM, you could right-click the two new logical partitions and try to extend them. If that works, it'll fill up the gaps.
j

Honestly, I'm satisfied with the way everything is now. Those little gaps will never become an issue, as far as I'm concerned, as long as it's just a tiny bit of space that we're talking about.

Ok, good that you got it all solved.
j

DiracDeBroglie said:

Ok, good that you got it all solved.
j

Thanks. And thanks for your input about the GParted program.

(Dearly, GParted...we gather here...)

j/k

Now that I know what can be done with Paragon 11, I might check out what GParted can do. I just wanted to make sure that the program I'd used before and trusted could get the job done here. What I'm sure I did wrong a year ago was not focus on the unnamed/unlettered extended partition, but rather on the logical Lenovo D drive. IIRC, I kept getting messages that said there wasn't enough space to extend it. And that was correct. I was trying to expand that logical drive in a space that could not handle it, rather than trying t expand the extended partition in which it was housed. Once I got that straight, it was a really easy solution.

Yes, you can check out things, try things out, experiment, what ever, but please don't do it on your main laptop. Best is to use some old hard drive that you put into an external USB enclosure, and try out the utilities then on that old hard drive. In case of serious failure you'll loose just a few dollars.
Alternatively you could also use simply an old USB Flash Drive (thumb drive) for your trials. GParted Live CD is linux based, which entails you can create a normal MSDOS partition scheme (with primary, extended and logical partitions) onto an USB Flash Drive. I've just done the test a few minutes ago and I've shifted the front of an extended partition forward, claimed part of the unallocated area into the extended partition, created a new logical partition; all that on a 6-dollar 8GB USB flash drive.

Good luck,
j

DiracDeBroglie said:

Yes, you can check out things, try things out, experiment, what ever, but please don't do it on your main laptop. Best is to use some old hard drive that you put into an external USB enclosure, and try out the utilities then on that old hard drive. In case of serious failure you'll loose just a few dollars.
Alternatively you could also use simply an old USB Flash Drive (thumb drive) for your trials. GParted Live CD is linux based, which entails you can create a normal MSDOS partition scheme (with primary, extended and logical partitions) onto an USB Flash Drive. I've just done the test a few minutes ago and I've shifted the front of an extended partition forward, claimed part of the unallocated area into the extended partition, created a new logical partition; all that on a 6-dollar 8GB USB flash drive.

Good luck,
j

Cool. Thanks again.

skbaltimore said:

And what you're saying is that PW will then create one new logical drive/partition consisting of the space created by shrinking C INSIDE the extended partition that's currently housing the Lenovo "D" logical drive? After that, can I then split THAT logical drive into 2 -- one 500 GB, and the other 90 GB?

Finally, does PW leave the existing Lenovo "D" logical drive intact?

I said to simply shrink C in Disk Mgmt, then in the shrink space create a new Logical partition with Partition Wizard Create Partition - Video Help. There is zero risk and PW handles Logical partitions as separate contiguous partitions rather than as part of a container.

This is posted for others who are finding this thread on Google, who appreciate advice directly from those who handle tens of thousands of these cases in Win7 alone, and don't presume to tell us how to deliver our advice.