Can’t resize FAT32 partition within Disk Management? Refer to this post and you can realize how to easily shrink or extend FAT32 partition without losing data.
“My external hard drive is formatted with FAT32 file system. Now, I want to shrink the partition on it and to create a new partition. But In Disk Management, when I right click the FAT32 partition, I only find that the option of Shrink Volume greyed out and the option of Extend Volume also greyed out. I’m very confused. Can’t I change the size of FAT32 partition? What should I do? Thanks in advance!”
Disk Management is a useful Windows built-in tool, which allows you to create, delete, resize parting, etc. However, it supports resizing only NTFS partition and is unable to shrink or extend FAT32 partition even there is contiguous unallocated space behind the FAT32 partition on the same disk.
Thus, here introduce a free yet professional partition tool, AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard. It enables you to enlarge or shrink FAT32 partition easily without losing data. In addition, it allows you to make conversion between FAT32 and NTFS without data loss, create FAT32 partition larger than 32GB, etc.It’s a fairly easy-to-use GUI tool and can work well under Windows 10/8.1/8/7, XP and Vista.
Free download AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard and have a look at how it shrink or extend FAT32 partition in Windows.
Resize FAT32 partition on external hard drive, SD card etc. just within few clicks
Step 1. Install and run AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard. In the main interface, right-click the FAT32 Partition and choose Resize Partition.
Step 2. In the pop-up window, put the mouse pointer on the right border of the FAT32 partition and drag the border leftwards to shrink the partition.
Step 3. Click Apply and Proceed to perform the pending operation.
After decreasing the size of FAT32 partition, there will be a piece of unallocated space behind the shrunk partition, you can create a new FAT32 partition on it or use it to extend another partition on the same disk.
(Supposed that there is unallocated space on the same hard drive, if not you can shrink partition with enough space or upgrade AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard to Professional edition to allocate free space from one partition to the FAT32 partition that you need to extend.)
Step 1. Right-click the FAT32 partition that going to be enlarged, choose Merge Partitions.
Step 2. In this window, check Unallocated and the FAT32 partition.
Step 3. You can preview the result. Click Apply and Proceed to commit the operation.
Notes:
The destination partition needs to have at least 1 GB free space before merging.
This way can also be applied to extend partition C on the system hard drive.
To experience more great functions, like splitting partitions, recover deleted FAT32 partition, etc, you can upgrade to Professional version.
If you don’t want to ask for the help of a third-party partition tool but still want to change the size of FAT32 partition. You can delete the FAT32 partition on the disk and create new FAT32 partition with the wanted capacity. But what you need to pay attention to is that deleting partition will cause data loss, you’d better backup your important data at first and it’s not allowed to create FAT32 partition beyond 32GB within Disk Management.