I recently made a 20gb partition from the C drive and called it the U drive. I needed another 10gb on U, so I shrunk C 10gb. When I right-click the U drive from Disk Management, "extend volume" is grayed out. Here's what I have now:
DISK: 149.05 GB Online
12.00 GB - Recovery Partition (Don't worry, I know not to touch this)
SYSTEM RESERVED - 102 MB NTFS - Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition)
Windows (C) - 106.94 GB NTFS - Healthy (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)
10.00 GB - Unallocated
Ubuntu (U) - 20.00GB NTFS - Healthy (Logical Drive)
Thanks for any help!
Use Partition Wizard to accomplish anything partition related, including creating, resizing, etc.
Download the
free Partition Wizard Home Edition v6.0, which you can install and run under Win7. If you need to do something touching the C-partition, it will queue up the operation and ask you to re-boot, at which time it will come in pre-boot and finish the operations you had queued.
Also
download and burn the ISO for the Partition Wizard standalone boot CD. Same functionality as under Win7 (except you won't see Windows drive letters), but you can do things immediately even when they affect the Windows C partition.
NOTES
----------
(1) a hard drive can have no more than FOUR PRIMARY PARTITIONS (P1, P2, P3 and P4). You cannot allocate a fifth primary partition.
(2) you can treat one of those four allowed primary partitions as what's called "the extended partition", inside of which you can sub-define any number of "logical" partitions (L1, L2, ..., Ln). Actually, as soon as you define your first "logical" partition that implies you've just defined one of your primary partitions to be the "extended partition", with the first "logical" partition L1 defined inside of it. Now you only have a maximum of three remaining primary partitions.
(3) Since there can only be one "extended partition" on a drive, if you do have at least one "logical" partition defined that means you really have one "extended partition" (as one of your four allowed primary partitions) which includes that one or more "logical" partitions inside of it. You don't actually see the "extended partition" anywhere, except in the graphical representation (i.e. colors) of Partition Wizard. But it's there, believe me, as it is the technology which facilitates "logical" partitions to exist.
(4) Because all "logical" partitions live inside of the one "extended partition", all "logical" partitions must be adjacent to each other... although there can also be free unallocated space interspersed between them. You can use Partition Wizard to re-size "logical" partitions, shrinking one and enlarging its neighbor for example, utilizing free space to create new "logical" partitions, etc. All of this is going on inside of the one "extended partition" and has no impact whatsoever on the up to three other primary partitions on the drive.
(5) You can change and assign your own drive letters for all partitions except for C, regardless of whether they are primary or logical. Partition Wizard can do this (just as Win7's Diskmgmt can do it for you).
(6) Given that there can only be one "extended partition" on a drive, with up to three other true primary partitions if you want, you cannot do complex operations of resizing and sliding partitions without taking into consideration whether you're working on the up to three primary partitions, or working on the "extended partition" with the sub-defined "logical" partitions inside of it. Partition Wizard understands all of this, and will either allow or not allow you to do something, based on the constraints and definitions I've explained above that rule how/where primary partitions exist, and what the "extended partition" is and what can be inside of it.
(7) The small "system reserved" partition (which is both primary and "active", meaning the boot manager files are inside and that's where the BIOS boots) is one of those four maximum total primary partitions allowed.
(8) You don't actually NEED a partition to be primary, except for that one "active" partition that the BIOS boots to. All other partitions can be "logical", as is really recommended when you create partitions on secondary hard drives. In fact, defining "logical" partitions rather than primary partitions even on your hard disk #1 primary hard drive is really a good idea, as it overcomes any limits of maximum number of partitions allowed, even on that first hard drive. Defining only "logical" partitions on secondary hard drives means the entire drive is now one single large primary "extended partition" and now any number of "logical" partitions can then be sub-defined inside of it, thus eliminating the "four maximum" limit on number of partitions you can define on a single drive. With "logical" partitions there is no limit.
(9) If you have unallocated space outside of the "extended partition" (i.e. that surrounding boundary around all of your contiguous "logical" drives, from the first L1 through the last Ln as well as any "logical" unallocated space which may be present on the extreme left or right of the "extended partition" (perhaps created if you delete a previously allocated "logical" partition) or interspersed between "logical" partitions) and you want to make use of it, your choice is to either (a) add it to the true primary partition adjacent to it (thus increasing the size of that primary partition), or (b) add it to the "logical" partition at the left side or right side of the "extended partition" adjacent to it, depending on where that unallocated outside space is relative to the "extended partition" itself. If you use Partition Wizard to do these resizings to "annex" the outside unallocated space, it will understand exactly what has to be done in order to accomplish the operation you specify. This includes enlarging the "extended partition" size to include this outside unallocated space (which is now going to be inside the "extended partition), and then resize the proper "logical" partition to make use of this newly available unallocated space which is now part of the now enlarged "extended partition", if you specify that you would like to enlarge a "logical" partition by making use of the outside unallocated space immediately adjacent to it .
===>> use Partition Wizard.
