Proper way to expand a partition

Hi all, great site. An exemployee of mine brought her computer (XPPro) to me to fix because she had lost her internet. After a very easy fix I was doing some cleaning/tuneup work on it for her. Some of my tune up programs had told me the box had a 200gig hard drive in it. Finishing up I got ready to run defraggler on 18.2 gigs of drive. I opened up disk management and sure enough there is an 18.2 gig partition and 170some gigs of unallocated space.

I have never had to do anything with partitions and wasn't sure how to give her back all the hard drive. I know Icould add a partition and direct data to it but what would be the best way to just expand the existing partition without losing the data it contains?

Researching it has just left me with more questions than answers. I know I can't use disk management (I think), could I use gparted off a live cd and not lose data or is there a better way? The unallocated space would need to be formatted first? Thanks.

 

First I'd image the drive just in case. If you don't have Ghost try http://redobackup.org/

I've used Partition Magic - now part of Symantec, but I have also used
http://partitionlogic.org.uk/manual/partition-ops/resizing.html
here is another free tool
http://www.partition-tool.com/easeus-partition-manager/
http://www.partition-tool.com/easeus-partition-manager/help/resizing-and-moving-partition.htm

Both are well rated, I have used one, the other I downloaded and installed but have'nt had a need for it yet.

In the case of partition magic, you would delete the large empty partition, then resize the OS part over the empty space and it formats the space for you.
I'd say they all would work in that manner.

 

I've used both Easeus and Partition Wizard and both seem reliable and safe from my experience. I think I switched to Partition Wizard because you can create a bootable CD in the free edition which is useful should something go wrong. I've never had anything go wrong with Partition Wizard but I like the idea of having bootable media should it be needed.

Edit: Expanding into unallocated space is actually the easiest operation. You don't have to format first, either program will do that as part of the operation. Basically, you just drag the slider at the right of the partition over into the unallocated space until you have it the size you want and then hit Apply.