How to Resize exFAT Partition Without Data Loss in Windows 10/8/7?

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Updated on December 5th, 2023

This article includes a step-by-step guide to resize exFAT partition without losing data in Windows 11/10/8/7. You can follow this guide to resize exFAT, FAT32 or NTFS partitions easily.

Issues on resizing exFat partitions in Windows

“I have two partitions on my 1TB external hard drive; one is exFAT partition which I want to increase size. But the Extend Volume option in Disk Management is greyed out. Is there any way to extend exFAT partition without losing data? I’m using Windows 10”

This is one of the most frequently asked questions online. With the increase using of exFAT file system, the resizing exFAT partitions is quite useful to many users. Free partition manager software can do the resize thing for you. The newly released DiskGenius (old name PartitionGuru Free) fully supports exFAT file system. Thus you can use it to extend, shrink, split, resize any exFAT partitions, recover deleted files from exFAT drives, back up or clone exFAT disks, etc. The thing is that the resizing process does not affect existing data.

How to resize exFAT partition without data loss in Windows?

  1. Install and run DiskGenius Free (old name PartitionGuru Free) to your computer.
  2. Select the partition you want to resize and right click mouse button to choose “Resize Partition”.resize exFAT partition
  3. Set partition size and click “Start” partition. There are two ways to set capacity size you want to change. You can drag the double-sided arrow on the partition from the left or right part, also you can enter the exact number in the column and press Enter key. The disk space getting from current partition can be added to another partition, used to create a new partition, or just kept as free space. In this guide, we cut 75GB from the rear partition of “Software” partition and add this 75GB to “Document” partition. Thus, the exFAT partition will be shrink to 150GB after resizing process completes.resize exFAT partition
  4.  After a while the resizing process will complete. Please wait patiently when the resizing is ongoing.resize exFAT partition

You can refer to this video guide to resize exFAT partition with ease:

Overviews on exFAT file system 

exFAT, Extended File Allocation Table, is one file system type introduced by Microsoft in 2006 and optimized for flash memory such as SD cards and USB flash drives. Microsoft introduced exFAT file system with Vista SP1, becoming the successor to FAT32 file system.

By default Windows operating system can only format disk up to 32GB only. When the drive being formatted is bigger than 32GB, FAT32 is no longer efficient. What’s more, the maximum file size of a single file on a FAT32 drive is 4GB, which is far from enough in many cases. Thus FAT32 partition is limited with file size it can hold.

exFAT has very large file size and partition size limitation. It allows individual files larger than 4GB, which facilitates a lot. For example, if a long continuous recording of video is larger than 4GB, digital camera using FA32 will break the file into several segments. Here a memory card using exFAT file system will be very useful.

Besides, exFAT owns better compatibility than NTFS. MAC OS X provides read-only support for NTFS, while it is fully support exFAT, including read and write. exFAT can also be accessed under Linux once appropriate software is installed. Therefore, it works with all versions of Windows and recent version Mac OS X.