How To Resize Your Partitions with EASEUS Partition Manager
If you’ve ever had to resize a partition, or make new partitions, then I completely understand what you most likely went through. Good partition management software for Windows is hard to come by, well the free partition managers anyways. Almost everyone has heard of Partition Magic, but there is a hefty price tag that comes with it.
As it turns out, there is a great application out there just for the Windows home user. It’s called EASEUS Partition Manager, and you should download it today!
In this short tutorial, I’m going to increase the size of the C: drive on my Windows Vista PC.
Important Note: Please backup your data before attempting to make changes to the partitions on your computer. There is always the potential for lost data – so take the time to ensure you have a good backup. If you need some help getting that started, check out this post on Backing up Your Windows Data the Simple Way – with Cobian Backup.
As you can see in the image below, My C: drive is about 40 GB, with only 5 GB of free space available. My D: drive is a second partition on the same physical drive as my C: drive. Under that you’ll notice I have 10 GB of Unallocated space. This is space that was never assigned to anything. I’m going to expand my C: drive to include this space – for a grand total of 50 GB.
The real trick in resizing the first partition on a multi-partition drive is in allocating the space in precisely the right location. In this example, all of the unallocated free space is at the end of the D: drive, which means I’ll have to move it to the beginning of the D: drive, so that I can eventually add it to C: drive. First, I’ll select the D: drive and click on the Resize/Move button. A new window opens up and lets you enter the new settings that you would like to use.
To move the unallocated space from the end to the beginning, simply copy the size from the Space After box and paste it into the Space Before box. The former will automatically reset to zero.
Now you can click Ok. It’s probably best to note that no changes have actually been made at this time. All that has been done is simply a list of changes has been added to a queue. Changes only take complete effect after a reboot.
Now, we still haven’t allocated any space to C: yet, we’ve only re-arranged D: drive. This time, select the C: drive and click the Resize/Move button. Once again we are presented with the change window.
As you can see, the unallocated space is now at the end of the C: drive. This time, drag the little arrow on the right-hand side of the yellow bar all the way to the right. This will stretch the D: partition to the end, and leave you with no unallocated space after.
This essentially completes all of the configuration required to resize the partition. Click Ok. You should be back at the main window again. If you are ready to complete the change, click the Apply button on the lower left-hand side of the window. Like any good piece of software, EaseUs Partition Manager will prompt you several times to make sure you want to continue.
Before you click Yes to both of these, please make sure that you have backed up your important data. Resizing a partition can be dangerous and there is always a risk of failure. If you have confirmed that you have a recent backup, click Yes and get ready to kill some time.
The operation as described above took almost four hours to complete. I wasn’t expecting it to take that long, so it actually seemed much longer as I watched the clock waiting for the work to finish. Here is a screenshot of what you can expect after the reboot.
After the four hour waiting period, Windows booted back up as normal and the new sizing was in effect.
Just to recap, EASEUS is a freeware partition manager for Windows. Most versions of Windows are supported, however 64-bit Vista is not. Don’t forget to get your copy from their download site.
Tags: EaseUs, Freeware, Partition Management
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[Click to close]18 Responses
What if you didn’t have any unallocated space? For example, I have a friend who has Windows Vista installed on his laptop (only 1 partition). What if he wanted to shrink the Vista partition and add another one? Will this software do that? Would you recommend using this software or something else? Thanks in advance
Hi Eric,
This software will absolutely do the task for your friend. He simply needs to shrink the size of the current partition by the amount that he wants the new partition to be. Once he has done that, he will have created unallocated space. Still using EASEUS, he can then create a new partition using the newly acquired unallocated space.
I tried to resize 2 side-by-side partitions: and G:) on my hard drive, but encountered a major problem. After rebooting several times, the G: partition data was erased and size of the partition was decreased. Using a Data Recovery
program and was able to restore all my files to the G:partition.
I started Partition Manager Home Free Edition again, and began the resizing process again with my C: drive, it looked fairly straight forward – since I
noticed that there was 32GB of unallocated space at the end of the C:drive that had not been there before. I moved the arrow until all the unallocated space was assigned to the C:drive. I selected resize/move, clicked on the C: partition,
clicked OK and APPLY. The system shut down and rebooted with nothing appeared on the screen (it’s not blue). The system has been running 8.5 hrs now, and so far nothing has indicated that the process was complete successfully. I rebooted the system again and rechecked the partition on C: – the partition was still not resized.
My questions are:
How long does it take to resize a partition when adding 32GB of space?
Should I reboot in order for the partitioning to be completed?
What could I have done that created this problem?
Fortunately, I did create backup of the C: drive with a bootable DVD ( 8rs ) just in case.
Thanks in advance!
Jerry Hildebrand
jrhildebrand@myacc.net
Jerry,
I’m very sorry to hear about the difficulties you have been having. I’ve used this application on about a dozen different systems now, with no issues.
The first thing that I noted as that you were performing a lot of operations there to resize the side-by-side partitions. I would suggest breaking the work down into smaller pieces and doing one at a time.
i.e. Decrease the size of one partition, reboot, move allocated space if necessary, reboot, increase the size of the other partition.
Doing this would give you a clear indication of where it was failing. The second thing I would recommend would be to contact the manufacturer, EASEUS, to get the answers to your questions and possibly some technical support.
Depending on the size of the partition and the amount of data on it, a resize operation can take a tremendous amount of time. Note the 4 hours for the minor resize in this post. Every situation is different and I couldn’t begin to speculate.
Rebooting is a necessary evil when it comes to making changes to partitions. Disrupting the processes that take place after the reboot can have disasterous effects, such as data loss.
Good luck, and check out the Partition Manager FAQs at http://www.partition-tool.com/easeus-partition-manager/faq.htm
hi norm… im having problems with this… when i partition the drive, try to create a new one and reboot it boots back into the start screen of vista, then the screen just goes blank and stays there and i can’t boot into vista,,, i have to go do it in the safe mode menu and use the last know good config and then my drives are not partitioned.
any ideas as to what i may be doing wrong?
Hey there,
i’ve had success partitioning my drive to 4 separate partitions. I was able to do this only after I defraged my harddrive though. It is possible that you’re having issues due to this, the files are spread out possibly contributing to the problem. Defrag the harddrive first, which might take a while if you have’nt in the past. Once your file are all neatly where they should be, partitioning will go smoothly.
i should also not that upon intial reboot i do not see the black screen with the progress report that you have pictured above.
great tutorial though!
great work dude! Thanks!
easeus partition master has been upgraded to version 4.0, with the new feature, you can expand ntfs partition without reboot, very useful, see this article http://www.partition-tool.com/easeus-partition-manager/extend-ntfs-system-partition-without-reboot.htm
Hi Norm, I was hoping to use this software to shrink the size of my D drive and add that memory to my C Drive. I read through the tutorial, but I am still not quite sure as to how to do this.