I installed a new/larger (4TB) hard drive on my computer. I have Windows 7 installed on the old drive (1TB) and using backup of the drive with a system image, I restored that to the new drive. All seems to work fine.
Now I want to extend the partition on the new drive. In Disk Management, I can see the unallocated disk space next to the allocated C: drive. There are no logical partitions, just the allocated and unallocated sections. When I right click to extend the C: drive, the "Extend" option is disabled.
Why would it be disabled and is there a way for me to enable it?
EDIT:
I found some posts that says it has to be converted to be a dynamic disk first, but this option is also disabled.
Best Answer
2TB is the maximum partition size of any MBR format disk.
Understanding the 2 TB Limit in Windows Storage
Windows 10 Creators Update provides us a safe, and non-destructive method of converting MBR to GPT using MBR2GPT.EXE. Unfortunately, you don't have Windows 10.
The safest alternative is to just create a secondary partition to use the remaining space. The new partition will show up as a new drive on your computer, and you can save data to it.
Only Windows 7 64-bit running on UEFI hardware supports booting from a GPT partitioned disk drive. If you're running on older hardware, or 32-bit, you are SOL. If your system meets these requirements and you are adventurous, the drive can be converted from MBR to GPT. The official way involves backing up your data and deleting all partitions to create a new GPT layout and then restore data. But, there are ways to convert MBR to GPT without losing data.
WARNING: Always verify you have a good backup of data BEFORE attempting to convert MBR to GPT.
Here are a couple of options:
In my opinion, you really should not be trying this. It is likely to fail. If you need a partition size greater than 2TB, is it unreasonable to expect you to also have a modern operating system, on modern hardware?