Shrinking and extended HDD

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FieldMouse

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#324259 19-Mar-2026 15:10

I am working on a new desktop computer for a friend. The drive is a 1TB SSD and the setup is as below.

I want to have 2 drives of a similar size (C: & D:), just to separate any files that the user creates away from the C: Drive.
There is already a D: Drive that contains OEM software and drivers and I thought I could extend that.
I shrunk the C: Drive successfully and then tried to extend the D: Drive, however the option to extend was greyed out.

I could create a new drive using the space I created by shrinking the C: drive and move the OEM files to the new drive, however I am left with 1.89GB of wasted space.

What is stopping me from extending the existing D: drive?

richms

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#3471722 19-Mar-2026 15:14

The recovery partition in the way. You need some more advanced partition management tools. There are free windows ones but they keep moving features to the paid versions, otherwise gparted on a linux bootable USB will move things around and resize them. Usual caveats with screwing with drives apply, dont do it to drives with anything irreplaceable on it. Should be backed up but we all know how useless people are at backing up.

Richard rich.ms

mentalinc

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#3471728 19-Mar-2026 15:23

agree Gparted good option, make sure there are backups when doing these sort of changes.

But partitioning a 1TB drive probably not the best course of action.

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FieldMouse

112 posts

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#3471804 19-Mar-2026 17:00

Thanks
Looks like best option is to change the drive letter of the existing D: drive and leave it there.
Then shrink the C: drive and create a new D: drive

Will that achieve the goal without damaging anything?