Need to move partition in Windows 11 or 10

Windows Disk Management comes with the "Shrink Volume" and "Extend Volume" features, allowing users to decrease or increase partition size. However, in most cases, when you try to extend a partition after shrinking another one, you will find the "Extend Volume" greyed out. That’s because shrinking a partition can only make unallocated space on its right side and extending a volume can only add unallocated space into the adjacent partition on its left side.

Therefore, you need to move partition, which is in the way of the target partition and the unallocated space, to the left side so that the unallocated space can be moved to the right side of the aim partition and extend it successfully.

How to move a partition in Windows 11/10/8/7?

Since Disk Management does not offer such an option to move any partition, it is necessary to use some third-party software like AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. This software works well on Windows 11/10/8/7 and Windows XP/Vista (either 32-bit and 64-bit). It has the "Move Partition" feature to help users reset the location of a given partition even though the drive has enabled Bitlocker encryption.

Supposing that you have a C partition, D partition, and an unallocated space on your Disk 1, and you want to enlarge partition C with the unallocated space. Here, you can follow the steps to first move partition D to the end of the disk so as to make the unallocated space directly after C partition. After that, smoothly extend C partition by adding that unallocated space in.

Before you do

• Download and install AOMEI Partition Assistant on a Windows computer.
• There must be an unallocated space adjacent to the target partition otherwise it cannot be moved.
• It would always be wise to make a backup before messing with the partition. The free backup software - AOMEI Backupper is a great choice for you.

How to move partition with Partition Assistant

1. Install and run AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. Choose the partition you want to move (take D partition as an example, and you can see there's an unallocated space located after D partition), right-click it, and then click "Resize/Move Partition".

4. Once the operation is finished successfully, you will see the D: is moved to the end of the drive.

After moving the partition successfully, you can extend the partition you plan with the feature "Resize/Move Partition". For example, you need to expand C, you can just right-click the C partition and select "Resize/Move Partition", drag the bar to the right side to extend it with the unallocated space.

Conclusion

With the help of AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, you can move partition easily and safely. This feature is usually used to move a partition forward or backward in order to resize/expand partitions with available free space.

Besides, there are many other useful functions in Partition Assistant.  You can merge adjacent and non-adjacent unallocated space into another partition via "Merge Partition" feature. If there is no unallocated space on the disk, you can also directly assign some free space from one partition to another by using the "Allocate Free Space" function. More advanced functions that Disk Management does not have are also available in this powerful partition manager program, such as cloning partition, transferring OS to SSD, converting MBR and GPT without deleting partitions, cloning hard disk, etc.

 

Notes:

• If other applications are running on the partition you will move, the software will notify you to close them or to execute this operation in PreOS Mode.
• Moving the system partition will require you to reboot the computer.

 

FAQs:

Q: Why a partition cannot be moved?

A: First, there is no adjacent unallocated space. So please make sure there is unallocated space adjacent. Second, the partition is BitLocker encrypted. So please decrypt the drive first.