Partitions, extending and recovery

[rege0039]

I have put Windows 10 on my Surface (I5/128/4) and am liking it but doing so has raised a few issues/questions;

1) When I partitioned my drive I didn't really give enough space for Windows 10. I have shrunk the Windows 8.1 partition a bit more and now have 2.5Gb of unallocateed space, but under Windows 10 I can't seem to extend its partition to use that unallocated space (option is greyed out in Disk Management).

2) In doing that I have noticed the 5Gb given to a recovery partition. Given that I have made a USB recovery drive that I have tested - do I need to keep giving such a lot of space to this ? If not, how do I add that space into my Windows 10 partition ?

 

[nipponham]

Given that I have made a USB recovery drive that I have tested - do I need to keep giving such a lot of space to this ? If not, how do I add that space into my Windows 10 partition ?

If you have migrated recovery data to a USB drive, there's no reason why you need to keep on disc as well. Just delete the recovery partion so that it becomes available and then right-click the volume that you want to expand and select “Extend volume”. You can specify the size you want to expand.

 

[wynand32]

Whether or not a partition can be extended depends on where the free space is located. AFAIK, the Disk Management utility won't extend a partition unless the free space is directly following it and before another partition. What you really need to do is move the partitions around the make the free space contiguous and immediately following the partition you want to resize. For that, you'll want to try a third party tool--EaseUS partition tool is one option (http://www.partition-tool.com/).