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Are you looking to make a larger volume or partition of your PC, but Windows Disk Management has made the option “Extend Volume” unavailable? This article will explain why it happens and the steps you should take to rectify it.
Microsoft Windows Disk Management Console allows you easily to increase or decrease the size of your volume. However, what happens if you don’t see the option to extend volume?
It could be due to one of several reasons. Learn how to resolve the grayed out extend volume issue in Windows 10 or 11.
These reasons can cause the “Extend Volume” option to a SSD or hard drive in Disk Management Tool to appear greyed:
Disk Management limitations are the main reason for most of these problems. You may not find the above troubleshooting steps too complex, so you might skip the section about how to use a third party partitioning tool. This will allow you to increase the partition size.
When there is no unallocated space on your SSD or hard drive, the most common reason that you will see “Extend Volume” grayed out in Disk Management console. This is storage that you haven’t formatted with a filesystem.
Disk Management may indicate unallocated disk storage on its graphic representation. The “Extend Volume” grayed option will still be grayed unless you have the space to your right of what volume you wish to extend.
Let’s say, for example, that your computer contains two partitions C and D drive letters. Send letters if you wish to extend C drive, you must delete D Use drive drive to allocate drive space. Disk Management offers the “Shrink Volume” option D Driving won’t make sense because D Driving will be a barrier between you and your destination C Drive and any unallocated space that results.
You can delete a partition to create space that is not allocated:
The partition will now appear as unallocated. You will be able to extend the volume without difficulty into the remaining unallocated area.
Another reason Disk Management may appear grayed is the presence of a Recovery Partition between the volume that you wish to expand and unallocated space.
We recommend against deleting the recovery partition as it helps to restore your computer in an emergency. If you still want to proceed, however, the DiskPart command line tool can be used via Windows PowerShell and the Command Prompt console.
But, be sure to Create a USB flash drive or USB bootable Windows recovery disc Instead, protect your computer from operating system corruptions and data loss.