How to Resize a Partition for Free in Windows 7

Windows 7 and Vista have a built-in functionality in Disk Management to shrink and/or expand partitions. You no longer need any 3rd-party utilities.

To enable this utility, just open up Control Panel and type in partition into the search box. You’ll immediately see this link show up:



Shrink a Partition

To shrink a partition, right-click on the partition that you want to shrink, under the Disk Management screen and choose “Shrink Volume” from the menu.


Under the Shrink dialog, you’ll need to enter the amount you want to shrink the partition by, NOT the new size. For instance, if you need to shrink your 50GB partition by around 10GB so that it will now be around 40GB, just enter 10000 into the box:


Extend a Partition

To extend a partition, just right-click on the partition that you need to extend under Disk Management screen and choose “Extend Volume” from the menu.


On this screen, you can now specify the amount that you need to increase the partition by. In this example, we’re going to extend it back to around 50GB size.

Please note that the extend partition feature only works with contiguous space.