Claim Free Partition Space

[ron spencer]

I have a Windows 7 install on a M.2 drive. I want to be able to add the 451 meg that is free and unallocated to the boot partition. Since the partitions are not side by side, how can I do this? I have a tried a bunch of programs unsuccessfully. Any ideas? See attached pic.


[Attachment 45365 - Click to enlarge]

[october262]

you try this ?? - https://www.disk-partition.com/resource/add-unallocated-space-to-system-partition-windows7.html

[TimA-C]

It's probably not worth the bother.

[pandy]

On your side i would do:
1 - copy existing partition to file (Norton Ghost or similar)
2 - remove all partitions
3 - with external partition manager create partition as you wish (format partition)
4 - copy (restore) partition from file

All above steps i would do from Windows PE or similar environment (Linux?) - there is plenty boot-able solutions that offer all necessary tools in one ISO for example Hiren’s BootCD (oldie but goldie) there are also way newer solutions based on WinPE ( Win 10 PE may deal better with newer HW such as AHCI SATA, USB3 etc) I usually have few different tool set's on dedicated flash thumbdrives.

[TimA-C]

For 451Mb? It's not worth the time, the effort or the risk of data loss and/or screwing up the system and ending up with an expensive, non-booting paperweight. If the OP is REALLY set on wasting his or her time then download a GParted live cd/usb/etc distro, follow the instructions to create a bootable USB memory stick (or CD/DVD), boot with said bootable media and move the partitions around, shrink the one you want to shrink and then expand the other into the freed up space. If you do decide to continue down this route MAKE SURE YOU BACKUP EVERYTHING AND TEST THE BACKUPS FIRST!!! Also, moving data around like this will shorten the life of your Hdd . . .

[DB83]

What I can not get my head around is why there is 451 mb of unallocated/un-formatted disk space available in the first place.

[pandy]

What I can not get my head around is why there is 451 mb of unallocated/un-formatted disk space available in the first place.

Windows prefer partition aligned to logical disc structure, also some unpopulated area may be reserved for other use...
Side to this https://lifehacker.com/5837769/make-sure-your-partitions-are-correctly-aligned-for-opt...ve-performance
Also this https://superuser.com/questions/393914/what-is-partition-alignment-and-why-whould-i-need-it

[DB83]

Thanks. Not that I begin to start to understand it

Maybe I am now glad that I formatted my SSD as plain ol' NTFS rather than GPT. No un-allocated space on that. And if it is reserved then the OP really is wasting his time trying to utilise it.

[pandy]

Thanks. Not that I begin to start to understand it

Maybe I am now glad that I formatted my SSD as plain ol' NTFS rather than GPT. No un-allocated space on that. And if it is reserved then the OP really is wasting his time trying to utilise it.

generally this trade-of between page size on flash, page size on hdd and page size as OS see storage space. on hdd it is implied by data structure on disk, on flash by memory architecture (like how big is area that must be erased before write - usually flash need to erase many bytes before writing information with single bit changed, also OS may prefer some granularity on data structure (so called sector is usually made from 512 or 4096 bytes) - at some point you need to hit some common number that satisfy all above.