Hi, I'm running Vista Home Premium and Windows 7 as dual boot in seperate partions on a 500GB drive.Originally I allocated Windows 7 60GB figuring I probably would not use it much, but I find I have been able to install all my applications and games without many problems and all my hardware is working nicely (no driver probs). While I plan on keeping my Vista boot up to date as my main OS, I need to give Windows 7 more room (applications, games, saved games etc all seem to get stored on the OS partition rapidly gobbling up space).In Windows 7 I was able to shrink my Vista partition (which shows up as the d: drive), releasing 30GB which is currently showing as unallocated. The problem I have now is that when I right click the c: partition in Disk Management, the Extend Volume option is greyed out.Anyways, can anyone tell me how to extend my c: drive to take the free 30GB ? (Hmmmm..... just had a thought, wonder if I need to reboot now).

The easy answer is yes, but it is not that easy. If you were to look at Disk Management, your Vista partition is probably ahead of your Windows 7 partition. Although you can extend a volume from within Windows 7, you can only extend it toward the rear (looking at the screen, to the right) of the current volume. Since your 30GB unallocated space is probably in front, the extend option is grayed out. To reclaim that space for Windows 7, you will need to use third party tools such as Partition Magic or the free GPARTED (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/) so that you could reposition your Windows 7 partition and move the unallocated space to the rear. Screen shots courtesy of http://gparted.sourceforge.net/screenshots.php.

Many thanks, I'll give that a try when I get home tonight!

Similarly I initially put Win 7 on to a 25Gb partition on my second HD and then wanted to give Win 7 the whole drive.In the end formating the drive and reinstallingWin 7 proved to be much simpler than merging the 2 partitions :(.

Hi DarienHawk67, I used Gparted to resize the patition as you suggested and it is a nice easy to usey method, however, when rebooting into Windows 7, the system reported that it could not find the device at the location pointed to by the boot.I was able to boot back into Vista (where I sit typing this note now), but it ran chkdsk first on the moved drive.Can I get the boot.ini hooked up to the new windows 7 partition (I'm guessing the boot.ini has a sector address or something and that this has moved). Should I do a Windows 7 repair install?TIA,Nick.

HiI do not know why you use gparted, but it is some useless tool thatcannot even recognize partitions on my drives in linuxOriginal tool that is working is called partition magic. Gparted copy interface of partition magic but it has to be better if it was working tooTo fix boot problem of W7boot from W7 DVD, and use repair feature to recover W7.When you start repair, it must find vista and W7 installation and will ask you what of them you want to repair.Select W7 and start repair.Wait repair to auto fix errors, then reboot and load W7.

GPARTED is fine. I haven't used it for that. I use the stand alone CD of Acronis TrueImage to first back up ("image") the partition (or you can back it up under windows),then I use the standalone CD of Acronis Disk Manager to delete the old partition,and then I use the stand alone CD of Acronis TrueImage to restore it, but modifying the size of the resulting partition. Pretty quick and effective.I have not had much luck with resizing ANY partition. with ANY program - many will do it, but leave it unuseable or with a bent MBR. Kris -------- Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P, E7200 2.53@3.8ghz, 2x1gb OCZ Reaper1150@1203, EVGA 9800GTX+ N873 , BFG GS-650, Vista Ult 32 SP1 / Win 7 7000

Gparted worked just fine for me. To get the extended partition tied up with the boot file I did a repair install as mentioned by someone else here. It detects that the boot file is wrong and offers to correct the "setup errors" first. Once it has done that I aborted the repair and it booted into Windows 7 just fine. Now the point of doing this was so I could defrag the disk properly as there was too little space before and I was getting a bad score in my "Windows Experience Index" due to slow disk performance. After defragging I find it is no better though.I'll start a new thread on this topic.

Gparted worked fine for me. I used the latest "Live" cd iso.

Er, you can directly use the free partition manager (if you running 32 bit) to add the unallocated space to your C: partition and extend partition, choose the proper edition to suit your situation. http://www.extend-partition.com/