My previous post talked about cloning your hard drive. This is a nice way to move your data to another hard drive, but what if you moved your data to a bigger drive and wanted to increase the partition. Windows doesn’t allow you to increase the size, so you’re left with using a partition manager.

Most partition managers require you to pay to use them and usually that’s not the way to go, so a free alternative is our best choice. One of the partition managers that I’ve been using for years now is BootIt-NG. This software says that you have to pay, but that’s only if you install it on your computer. If you run it from a CD, then you are allowed to partition any computer without installing a thing on that computer. The software allows you to create an bootable image which can therefore be burned to CD and all you have to do is have the CD inserted upon reboot and it will load the software (provided your BIOS is configured to boot from CD first). BootIt-NG supports Fat, Fat-32, Linux partitions, NTFS, and many more partitions.

If you wanted to go further and buy this partition manager, then you can install it on your computer and use it as a boot loader also. It has even been updated to allow customization in the program.