Unable to increase partition size

[Alex]

I'm trying to increase a partition's volume using the partition manager that comes with windows 7 and I'm running into a problem. Last time I was attempting to this I looked up my problem and eventually found out that it was because of the unallocated space that I have on my hard drive is located to the left of the partition I'm attempting to increase. I've heard that there might be some partitioning software that will allow me to extend partitions from unallocated space located to the left of the partition, but I'm not sure if that's true or not.

 

Anyone know any partitioning software or other method that I can use to get this to work?

[Daniel0]

Try booting from some sort of Linux live CD and use gparted or fdisk. If it's an NTFS partition then you can use ntfsresize.

[Garethp]

Daniel is right. gparted will allow you to move partitions from one side of the disk to another.

 

Windows 7 extends partitions by saying "Instead of the partition going from block x to block y, it now goes from block x to block z", but z HAS to come (physically) after x. If you have [w- unallocated, x- partition 1 part 1, y- partition 1 part 2], Gparted will move it to [w- partition 1 part 1, x- partition 1 part 2, y- unallocated]. But if you have a large partition already, be ready to leave it on for a long time. It'll copy each byte from x to w, and then y to x.

 

If you want to go for it, download http://www.ubuntu.com/ and burn the disc. Boot up from it and you should be able to run ubuntu without installing it. This way you can use Gparted without having to render your computer useless while doing it