EASEUS Partition Manager: Moving a partition

I encountered a strange dilemma. I was using HDClone to clone my hard drive, and as I’ve said in my last post, I messed up my Windows installation. After deciding to reinstall Windows, I encountered another problem. My partition table. You see, my hard drive has 500GB instead of 160GB (my old HDD). So here is my issue:

The first disk (Disk 0) is my original HDD, the second one is my new one. Now, that 329 GB partition on Disk 1 has 100 GBs of data on it that I have nowhere to back up. The 48GBs partition on Disk 1 is where my Windows 7 installation was until I deleted it. My issue is that I need to move the 329 GB partition to the right, by about 20-30 GBs so that my W7 partition can have more data.

Here’s how I did it:

Step 1: Choose What You Want To Do

Go to your start menu, type in “disk” and open up the disk manager. You should see something like this:

Probably less drives, different partitions, or whatever. This is what your hard drive looks like. Disk 0 should be your primary disk where your OS installation should be. If you’re running Win7, you’ll have the 100mb System reserved partition and the main system partition. I created an extra data partition.

Choose what you want to do. Is it worth it moving that data/adjusting the partitions? In my case, it is, I have nowhere to back up my data, and I want to move a single partition. By the way, it does not have to be a partition stuck between two unallocated data segments! You can do this on your disk even if it looks like your Disk 0, but I am focusing on Disk 1 so let’s move on.

Getting EaseUS Partition Manager

EaseUS Partition Manager is a free tool that will let you MOVE the partitions. You may have noticed that the Windows Disk Manager does not let you do that. The program is FREE but only if your system is non 64-bit. If it is, you will get a message that tells you to buy the professional version. If that happens, try the GParted tutorial on moving/adding/deleting partitions.

Installation is pretty straightforward so I won’t go through that thoroughly. Let’s move onto what to do.

Using Easeus Partition Manager

Boot up the partition manager and you should see a similar set up as in the Windows Disk Manager:

Again, on top, you have the drives, on the bottom you have more information about your drives. Here’s the rundown of controls on the top bar:

1. Undo: This will undo the last action you do. Remember, when you change something, it will NOT take effect until you click on apply on the bottom left.
2. Apply: Another position of the apply button. Once you click this, the program will go into action and do everything you told it to do. Until you click on it though, nothing will change
3. Move/Resize: Here you can manually move or resize any partition. Here is a trick: if you want one partition to be bigger than another, shrink one first, and extend the other. You might have to MOVE the partitions accordingly to make it work!
4. Create: If you click on Unallocated data, you will be able to create a partition using various formats. The most widely used format for Windows partitions is NTFS. Backup hard drives usually use FAT32. FAT is not used anymore
5. Delete: Click on a partition, press delete and the partition is deleted!
6. Format: Click on a partition and you can change the format of that partition, ie. from FAT32 to NTFS. Unfortunately that erases all of the data. You can also use this to erase the data (if you want to) but remember that this will not actually ERASE the data permanently. If you’re thinking about selling your HDD, or throwing it away, use an actual eraser program. Formatting will only make the data unavailable to users without HDD recovery tools
7. Copy: Self-explanatory. You copy a partition.
8. Copy Dynamic Volume: A dynamic volume is a partition that is not placed in sequence. You see how all these partitions are nicely organized? One after another? A dynamic volume is one that may be located before AND after another partitions. In effect, it’s like having two partitions in one. Unfortunately, such a volume is useless for OS installations. This copy button is for those kinds of partitions
9. Properties: This will give you all the information you need about a partition.

Self-explanatory, indeed. Try it out! One great thing about the partition movement is that you can just grab a partition and move it around. It will tell you by how much you’re moving your partition. I clicked on the partition and dragged it to the right by 15 GBs.

Apply Changes

Once you’re done messing around, click on the “apply” button. You will go through a dialog. Keep on clicking next and here is what the progress of moving a partition will look like:

EASEUS will automatically move the data on the partition to preserve it. It may take some time. For example, I’ve written this whole article while waiting for it to be done, while watching a show on Hulu. It takes a LONG time if you have a lot of data, even if you move it just 15 GBs, and especially if you are using an external HDD but wait for it, it’s worth it. It might be useful to defragment first for faster operations, keep that in mind.

The Result

Here we go, and that’s the result of a few hours of working through this!