Windows 7 - Partition or Volume - Extend

Great guide,and I post to say I saw dave76's post,tried partition wizard,and it worked.
Hope this helps.

I'm used to using the old Partition Magic 8 for WinXP but Partition Wizard on Windows 7 is so much faster and easier to use IMO.

Hi, I had a recovery partition leftover from my old HP installation of Vista. So After I installed Windows 7, I decided to reclaim that space since I didn't need it anymore. So I used method one above (actually on my own without looking it up..which was probably stupid). However where it says above:

"NOTE: If the partition that you want to extend is to the right of the unallocated space, then you will need to use METHOD TWO below to extend it instead."

My recovery partition WAS to the right of my C (main) drive. I should have used method 2. I tried using 2 after 1 failed, but now I am left with the following:
-I have a 160GB HD.
-C shows as having about 149GB, which is about right when you subtract the 11GB the Recovery used to have.
-When I add up the space my files should take up, I get that it should take up about 40.6GB, which leaves me with about 109. However, my C is showing only 81GB free...maybe that's restore points from my recent install of 7 and all my other software the other day?

So I'm missing about 40GB of my drive...and I'm not sure where it went. I don't think its bad, it's listed as healthy, and the math has always worked out before. Thanks for any help anyone could give me...I am kinda new to messing around with this kind of stuff.

Hello Clarion,

Here are some common reasons for a missing hard drive space:

• The hard drive always formats smaller than the advertised size. For example, a 750GB (decimal) drive formats to only 680GB (actual).
• Allocated (reserved) free space for restore points, page file, and shadow copies.
• Installed programs and data.
• Windows 7 creates a 100MB System Reserved partition, and up to 20GB for Windows 7 itself.
• 1 to 2 GB of reserved unallocated space on the hard drive for system use.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Thanks, I figure that's what's happening with the C: drive, but I'm still trying to figure out what happened to the 11GB in the Recovery Partition. I had 80GB free before and after deleting that Recovery Partition.

Clarion,

Could you post a screenshot of Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc)? This will let me see the layout of your drives that may explain what happened to the 11GB recovery partition.

Here it is . . . the visual box shows the disk going infinitely to the right.

Well, there's not any unallocated space on the disk, so you drive layout is fine. It's going to be the reasons above then for your missing hard drive space.

No, but there was 11GB unallocated from the deleted D: until I extended drive C: and it all disappeared.

True dat.