How to Resize a Partition on Windows 10

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Windows 10 includes Disk Management to shrink and expand partitions.

You don’t need a third-party partition manager for basic tasks, although they will often by more feature-rich.

This works on other versions of Windows, like Windows 11 and Windows 7, too.

A hard drive outside of a computer.

Hannah Stryker / How-To Geek

In this example, our drive is almost full and only has 1.6 gigabytes free.

If your drive has more, you’re able to just enter the correct amount.

An example will make that clearer.

Search for "Disk Management" in the Start Menu.

On Disk 1, we have two existing partitions: “Storage” and “Example Volume.”

We also have an additional 9.77 GB of unallocated space.

If you try, you’ll get a warning about creating a dynamic disk.

Right-click a partition on a disk, then click "Shrink Volume."

They also make moving the drive between computers difficult.

Avoid dynamic disks —they’re deprecated and shouldn’t be used.

you might modify partitions while Windows installs, too.

Enter the amount of space you want to shrink the partition by, then click "Shrink."

This can be handy if you know in advance you’re going to want a particular configuration.

There are many reasons you might want to resize a partition.

Right-click a partition on a drive with unallocated space, then click "Extend Volume."

For example, you may want to set up adual-bootsystem.

you’re able to shrink the existing partition so that unused space becomes unallocated, and then installUbuntuthere.

Alternatively, maybe you have the opposite scenario.

Enter the size you want to extend the partition by, then hit "Next."

Format the former Linux partition, then extend your Windows partition into that space.

Things only get more complicated when you start mixing operating systems withdifferent file systems.

The partitioning of Disk 1.

You cannot extend a partition into non-contiguous space without using a dynamic disk.

The partition manager available during Windows install.