How do I increase the primary partition of my Win 7 system partition?

July 7, 2010 6:33 PM

How do I increase the primary partition of my Win 7 system partition? Disk Management tool is not allowing me to do this.

In Win 7 (64-bit, Ultimate ed.), I've run out of space in my C: drive where the OS is located. The HD has 4 partitions (in order):

C: 30GB (primary/system)
4GB Free space
D: 190GB
F: 12 GB (page file)

I can turn the 4GB area into a logical drive, but for such little gain in space, I just get an extra drive letter to be confused by. I can also expand/shrink D and F into each other. But, that seems to be all that I can do.

I'd like to simply expand C: or merge C, D, and the free space into one partition. Disk Management does not seem to allow any of these options. If it comes down to needing a 3rd party program, I'm curious as to how permanent it makes the partitions. Is the OS "tricked" into thinking the computer is partitioned in a certain way, thus requiring the program to always be there? Or, can I get a program, change the partitions, then remove the program and still have the changes?

posted by Swede78 to Computers & Internet (16 answers total)

Have you tried gparted? A Free partition editor, and it comes in LiveCD format.
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php
posted by multiphrenic at 6:48 PM on July 7, 2010

Try Easeus Partition Manager - free, and should allow you to do what you need. I have used it to create new partitions, resize, etc. As far as I know, the changes are permanent.
posted by stennieville at 6:50 PM on July 7, 2010

There is no trickery involved in how those programs work.

(Also, I have to mention that putting the page file at the end of the drive is exactly the wrong thing to do. Those innermost cylinders are the slowest. The only reason to ever bother with a dedicated swap partition is so you can locate it at the outermost cylinders for speed; otherwise, you'd have better luck having swap as a regular file of fixed size and one fragment.)
posted by Rhomboid at 7:14 PM on July 7, 2010

For some mysterious reason, Microsoft doesn't allow you to change the size of the primary partition. It's really a pain.

30G is painfully small, by the way. Did you know you can install programs to a partition other than C? Pay attention during installation and you can get a chance to choose your D partition instead. Uninstalling and reinstalling some of your larger apps onto the other drive is a way to get some space back on C.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 8:08 PM on July 7, 2010

I've had problems with Windows partition sizes getting eaten up for years. I am an admin/consultant. I've started using the whole available disk for C: drive. Microsoft keeps making Windows fatter every time there is an update. Many Windows apps and utils like antivirus demand to be located on C: drive then keep using more space (Symantec comes to mind). I had a fleet of Windows servers with too little space on drive C: after running them a while. I kept making C: drive bigger by multiples and it got consumed too. Program Files folders grow and grow.

Now days I would just get a big drive and make the whole thing drive C: . Filesystem, journaling and fault tolerance has improved enough that partitions make more hassle than benefit. When more tolerance is required RAID is the way to go. If you need more space, get an additional drive. They are so cheap now.

For around $100 you can get a 1TB (1000GB) drive now. I would get a 1TB, install it all drive C:, then restore all your stuff to it. Otherwise you will forever be babysitting disk use.
posted by nogero at 8:27 PM on July 7, 2010

Nogero, the problem is that with Win 7 you cannot make the whole drive into a C partition. It forces you to have at least two, and it forces the C partition to be small.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 8:51 PM on July 7, 2010

There is a different way to do it, however. If you have a Vista install disk, you can partition your drive the way you want using it. Then you upgrade to Win 7.

But that's really half-assed.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 8:52 PM on July 7, 2010

Choclate Pickle, that's at best half correct. While under certain circumstances Windows 7 will require you to have a small (on the order 200 meg) partition which is used for recovery informatiom, the C drive does not have to be small (the 200 meg partition is not given a drive letter and wouldn't show up in explorer). I have a bunch of Windows 7 machines with 500GB drives where C takes up the whole drive (sans the 200 meg partition).
posted by mge at 8:57 PM on July 7, 2010

You can avoid the double partition on Win7

During the install, when prompted to pick a drive to install to, if you chose the default disk scheme, you will get the 200Mb recovery partition created. To avoid this, choose "advanced" at this point, delete whatever partition(s) are present, and create a primary partition which occupies the entire drive. This prevents Win7 from creating the recovery partition, though it will put the recovery files it needs on the C drive instead.

You could also delete the recovery partition with Parted Magic, or some such bootable CD, but this will prevent Win7 from booting (as the active partition, containing the boot database, is put on the recovery disk). If you are feeling brave, you can boot with a WinPE CD at this point and use the marvellously unfriendly BCDEdit to create a new boot database and all will be well.
posted by nicktf at 11:11 PM on July 7, 2010

1- I'm pretty sure disk drives write the inner tracks first and move outward. So the end of the drive is theoretically the fastest place for the swap. But a separate partition for swap is probably going to lose as much speed as it gains since you are forcing the RW head to constantly flitter from wherever it is to the end of the drive when the OS wants to swap.

2- Check the allocation unit size. If they are different, you pretty much can't combine partitions.

3- I have not had luck with any of the Partition Magic style partition combiners. It is really asking for trouble, IMO.

4- Even if you could expand the C partition "online" with Disk Management, you can't shrink partitions with is. Screwed either way.

5- So what I would do is back everything in the D partition up onto another drive. It shouldn't take very long if you plan ahead. Let it copy over night or something. Then boot with some kind of recovery disk- WinPE of some kind should do it, as well as gparted. Delete the D and F partitions and then expand the C partition. Expanding partitions is usually fairly pain-free.

Then boot the computer back up, turn off the page file, defragment, create a permanant page file by making its minimums and maximums the same size, then copying all your stuff back onto the new, giant C drive.
posted by gjc at 4:55 AM on July 8, 2010

I'm pretty sure disk drives write the inner tracks first and move outward.

Nope. Sectors are numbered such that the beginning of the logical disk corresponds to the outer tracks and is always faster.
posted by Rhomboid at 5:05 AM on July 8, 2010

Thanks for the replies. My brother built my computer, and setup the page file partition. In theory, it makes sense to separate it. I think his thinking was that it would be cleaner, not necessarily faster. So, I like the idea of forcing a fixed size. That makes sense. I forgot to mention that I do have another HD, I use for backup. And, after I installed Win 7, I used it's built-in backup tool to create a system image. So, I could wipe the HD and reimage it. But, can you do that without win installed? I could always just reinstall everything from scratch, but that's just a pain. I was just hoping for a quicker, less painful fix.

I know you could install programs anywhere in XP, but wasn't really sure with win7 64-bit. It has the two separate folders for 64-bit and 32-bit software. So, as I've been installing things, I've just allowed it to put them in its respective folder. I guess, it's just an organizational thing. What's strange is that I honestly don't know what's eating up so much space. My user profile is 4 GB when I check it's properties. But, when I go in and check sub-folders, I only come up with a couple hundred MB. Also, I have very few programs, no games. It's kind of strange how much space win 7 uses. I have a few programs that have both a 32-bit and 64-bit version. So, that's using up more space. I guess 30GB is not a lot these days. I remember having a computer with a 20MB HD. :)

@Chocolate Pickle: I jumped from XP to Win 7, so I don't have a Vista disc.
posted by Swede78 at 7:08 AM on July 8, 2010

I just did this with the included GUI tools in Ubuntu. I think the Ubuntu live disk I used was one version old. (The last brown one?).

I had specially forced the old Win7 had been to have only one partition, the C drive, with no recovery partition. I imaged the old drive with Clonezilla, replaced the hard drive with a larger one, and of course the image I wrote onto the new drive stayed with the partition sizing from the old drive.

I then used Ubuntu's tools to resize the drive's C partition to cover the entire disk. Ubuntu gave no complaint about resizing C, and an on first boot into Windows 7 it merely ran a chkdsk and then went on its merry way with no other complaints or issues.
posted by NortonDC at 7:42 AM on July 8, 2010

I just realized I upgraded a Vista64 to my only Windows 7 disk, so on a 750GB drive I have a 13GB recovery partition and the remainder 736GB is drive C: . I also recently built a Windows 2008R2 and chose defaults (I think), it made a similar setup: one large partition for drive C: plus a small recovery and MSR.

My primary boot OS on this PC is Ubuntu 10.04 however. I only boot up Windows 7 for a couple of applications Ubuntu can't do. Ubuntu 10.04 is so superior to Win7 I can't stand Windows 7 anymore.

All the concern about page file. Does anyone ever really use page (swap)? The only time I can recall it getting used is in the case of a run away process. Anytime it is used to slows the machine to a crawl anyway. It is needed to prevent a crash in a load, maybe some scientific/spreadsheets might eat up memory, but doesn't it largely go unused in normal operations?
posted by nogero at 8:26 AM on July 8, 2010

I always thought the page file was there for when your systems runs out of RAM. I use Photoshop, which is a memory hog, so I think I'd have issues if it was disabled.
posted by Swede78 at 1:47 PM on July 8, 2010

The page file is more complex than that. Lesser used data / not required to be in RAM will end up on it. Some programs will reserve a chunk of memory (Say 500MB) even though they don't need it / use it 90% of the time. Windows will give them that memory, but is smart enough to split that between RAM and pagefile.
posted by defcom1 at 8:53 PM on July 8, 2010