Hard drive > Easiest tool to "extend" a 250 gig hdd to a 500 gig after cloning

I know how to use "diskpart" but if the original hdd has a recovery partition it sometimes wont extend.

So looking for easy options to do the job.

diskmgmt doesn't work for you?

Easus Partition manager.

http://www.partition-tool.com/

Use Dell's extpart. It goes above and beyond what diskpart can do, it will let you extend a drive even if it is a system or boot drive.

http://www.dell.com/support/drivers/us/en/04/DriverDetails?DriverId=R64398&FileId=2731129714&DriverName=Dell%20Basic%20Disk%20Expansion%2C%20v.1.0.4%2C%20A01

http://partedmagic.com/doku.php?id=downloads
This is open sourced Parted Magic ISO image. Download it and burn as ISO to CD. Boot the machine from it and start Partitioning tool. Repartition your drive as you want and restart to Windows.

Hi, Typically the hard drive I want to extend will have a C: and a recovery partition.
They will be laptops that had a bad hdd and as a bonus the owner is getting a bigger hdd.

I like the look of Boot-It BM - but its not free.

The free demo download will do all you need -- although it's easily worth the modest cost.

... note also that recovery partitions aren't worth much.    A much better approach is to do a recovery;  do all of the updates (service packs, updates, etc.);  install the software that you use (and any updates);  and then create an image on an external drive.     Then if you ever need to recover, you don't start at square one (the original factory install) -- you can recover to a fully configured and up-to-date (as of the image date) system.

That also means you only have one partition to move to any new drive -- so it's much simpler to extend it to fill the new, probably larger, drive.   (You could also leave enough space for a 2nd partition large enough to copy the image to --- then the "recovery" image on the 2nd partition would be the fully configured system).