AOMEI Partition Assistant is one of the best free alternative to Dell ExtPart. Besides, it's not only for Dell computer, but all brands of computer.
ExtPart is an excellent disk expansion tool of Dell, which was released on July 30th, 2003. It supports for online volume expansion of NTFS formatted basic disks in Dell PowerVault, compatible with PowerVault 770N (Deskside NAS Appliance), PowerVault 775N (Rackmount NAS Appliance), PowerVault 750N (Deskside NAS Appliance), PowerVault 775N (Rackmount NAS Appliance), with earlier Windows operating systems, such as Windows Server 2000/2003, Windows Vista/XP, those OSes who never has an Extend Volume option in the Windows Disk Management. ExtPart utility can expand partition for Windows with the unallocated space on your hard drive, but you can only add the available free space to the partition if it is directly after the partition that you are planning to extend.
However, ExtPart isn’t compatible with 64 bit systems. If you are working with a 64 bit system, do not worry about that. The ExtPart is the self extractor that does not work on 64 bit system. So, you can extract the utility on a 32 bit machine, and move the real expart.exe to the 64 bit machine, then, you can enjoy free boot the disk expansion tool without downtime or reboots.
Unlike the later Windows 7/8/10 or Windows 2008 (R2)/2012 (R2)/2016, the previously Windows Vista/XP, Windows 2000/2003 cannot extend partition with Extend Volume function of Disk Management. Because there is no Extend Volume option in the legacy Windows system. Thus, Dell provides ExtPart for users to extend volume. How to expand volume with Extpart? Here takes an example to extend C: drive for 1024MB.
1. You need to download ExtPart first, install it on your PC, and make sure that there is enough unallocated space after the C: drive.
2. Click Start menu, type “cmd” in the search box, press Enter to run it.
3. Location the utility extpart.exe was extracted.
4.type “expart c: 1024” and press Enter, you will extend the C: partition with 1024 MB, like the following picture shows.
Although the Dell ExtPart is a good expanding tool, there are many limitations that mentioned above. To save the old utility with many restrictions, here we have found the best free Dell ExtPart alternative - AOMEI Partition Assistant.
AOMEI Partition Assistant is a good partition to manage software that can extend partition without those restrictions of Dell ExtPart. What’s the most important thing is that it has two free editions Standard and Lite editions especially for Windows PC, including Windows XP/Vista/7/8/10, and Windows Server, including Windows 2000/2003 (R)/2008 (R)/2012 (R)/2016 . Both of them can help you extend partition more flexible in free. Take an example with Windows PC system, if you want to extend C: drive with the unallocated space on your hard drive, no matter where it is located, you can use this software to expand it.
Step1. Download AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard, install and launch it, you will see that there is an unallocated space at the end of the disk. To expand the C: drive, you can right-click C: drive, select Advanced and choose Merge Partitions.
Step 2. Then, you can tick the box to add the unallocated space to the C: drive directly.
Step 3. Finally, click Apply at the toolbar to execute the pending operations.
Actually, there are many other ways to extend C: drive with this extend partition software, like using the Extend Partition Wizard, or the function Resize Partition, even if there isn’t unallocated space on the hard drive, you can use the Allocated Free Space to make system partition bigger with other partitions’ free space. For Windows Server system, you can use the Lite edition, and if you want to get more utilities, you can upgrade it to Server Edition. In one word, no matter for Windows PC users or Windows Server users, AOMEI Partition Assistant is the best Dell ExtPart free alternative.