How to Recover Unallocated Drive Space

Unbeknown to most users, there is usually a portion of hard drive space that is not allocated to the active partition and sits on the hard drive unallocated and unused for any purpose. This drive space can be anywhere from a few megabytes to up to a couple of gigabytes in size. Reclaiming this drive space for use by the system is an easy task that any computer user can perform to gain full use of the hard drive.

Instructions

1. • 1
     Click the "Start" and then "Run" buttons within the Windows desktop to produce a text box for entering run commands.
   • 2
     Type "compmgmt.msc /s" (without quotation marks) into the resulting text box. This will start the Windows computer management utility.
   • 3
     Click the "Disk Management" link in the left-most frame within the program window. This will start the virtual disk service that will allow you to view disk partitions and adjust them accordingly.
   • 4
     Right-click the drive whose partition you wish to extend over the unallocated space. This will produce a standard Windows context menu.
   • 5
     Left-click the "Extend Volume..." heading within the context menu. This will start the extend volume wizard.
   • 6
     Click the "Next" button on the Extend Volume wizard's welcome screen.
   • 7
     Select the disk whose partition you wish to extend from the left pane of the wizard and click the add button in the center of the wizard's program window.
   • 8
     Enter the amount of unallocated space you would like to add to the partition at the bottom of the program window. The maximum amount available on the disk to extend the partition by will be listed near the bottom portion of the window for reference.
   • 9
     Click the "Next" button to begin the extension process. This will only take a few moments, depending on the size of your hard drive.
   • 10
     Click the "Finish" button when prompted by the wizard to complete the recovery of your unallocated hard drive space. You may begin using it immediately; no reboot is required for this process.