Extended volume option grayed out in Windows 10/11 fix

Disk Management Tool allows you to create, format, shrink or expand volumes of your choice on your Windows laptop/PC. If there is no unallocated space available on the disk drive, you may see "Extend Volume" grayed out in the right-click context menu. this is normal. But what happens when you have a lot of unallocated free space on your drive and Disk Management still shows the "Extend Volume..." option as gray? Don't worry. Following these simple instructions should help you solve your problem.

Fix 1 – Create Free Space

The disk drive you want to expand requires some free space on the drive. A volume cannot be extended if there is not some free space in the volume. You can shrink the volume to create some free space.

1. First, press the Windows key and X key at the same time.

2. In the right-click menu, click "Disk Management" to open it.

#3. On the disk management page, view the partitions. See if you can find any "Unallocated Space".

4. If you cannot find free space, you can delete any unnecessary volumes to make up for the available space.

Note – Deleting a volume means erasing all data it contains. So if you have important content in this section, copy and paste the content to a secure drive.

5. Next, right-click on the unwanted volume and click "Delete Volume".

6. If you see a warning message, click "is" to confirm deleting the volume.

7. After deleting the volume, you will notice that the equal amount of storage space has been displayed as "Unallocated Space".

8. Now, right-click on the drive you want to extend and check if it is grayed out.

You can now easily extend your volume by following the wizard's steps.

Fix 2 – Shrink Volume and Expand

Without completely deleting the drive, you can shrink the volume from another partition (or drive) and extend the equivalent size to another.

You can follow the steps below to shrink another volume -

1. First, right-click on the Windows icon and click on "Disk Management" Turn it on.

2. Just right-click on the volume with larger unused space and click "Shrink Volume..." to shrink the volume you want of volume.

#3. Now, set the value for how many MB to shrink.

Like you want to shrink by 15 GB. So, the calculation is -

15*1024=15360 MB

4. After that, click "Shrink" to reduce the size.

After shrinking the volume, you will see that free space has been created.

5. Next, just right-click on the volume you want to extend and test whether the "Expand Volume" option is grayed out.

Check if this solves your problem.

Fix 3 – Formatting non-NTFS drives

If the drive is in any format other than NTFS, you may see the "Extend Volume" option grayed out. In fact, NTFS-formatted drives do expand to fill larger partitions.

So, if you are using a FAT32 drive, you must first format it to NTFS and then you can expand it as needed.

1. Right-click the Windows icon on the taskbar and click "Disk Management" in the context menu.

#2. After opening the disk management page, check the file type of the volume.

3. If the volume is of FAT32 file type, it must be formatted.

4. Simply right-click on the drive and click "Format" to format it.

5. A warning message will appear on the screen. Then, click "is".

#6. Next, set the drive type to " NTFS " from the drop-down menu.

7. Then, click "OK".

After formatting the drive, you can extend the volume very easily.

Fix 4 – Use a third-party tool

Disk management tools only provide some basic functions of disk management. There are many free third-party tools you can use to expand your volume.

One such tool is AOMEI Partition Assistant. You can easily extend your drive using this tool without facing any unusual trouble.

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