When system partition is about to running out of space or showing low disk space alert on Windows Server 2003 or other Server systems, we can use many methods to extend this partition and improve system performance again.
And when C Drive on the dynamic disk is getting lower partition size, the Extend Volume option in Disk Management and Extend command line of diskpart.exe are good choices to enlarge system partition capacity with ease:
Press Win+R and type diskmgmt.msc to open Disk Management from the Run dialog box and press Enter. Then in the disk-map check if there is unallocated space on any other dynamic disks, if there is such space, you can:
Right-click on C Drive and choose to Extend Volume
And follow the Extend Volume wizard to enlarge C Drive space.
If there is no unallocated space on any hard drive, you can use the following step the create some:
Shrink Volume on a large partition with much free space
Then Extend Volume on C Drive.
If you’re familiar with command line, you can use diskpart to extend system volume instead of on a dynamic disk with the following command after you opened diskpart.exe.
list volume > select volume C > extend
Simply type the command Extend will take all the unallocated space available on dynamic disk, type the following instead will extend only desired size.
extend size=20480
That’s 20G, or you can input other numbers to extend.
Steps to extend low sized system drive on a basic disk are almost the same if unallocated space is continuous to C Drive, but if there’s no unallocated space followed, the Extend volume option in Disk Management and the command Extend in diskpart.exe will not work and will run errors.
There are two ways of creating unallocated space in Disk Management: Shrink volume and Delete volume, in this C Drive extending case, the function Shrink volume will not be a helper, the option Delete Volume is the only choice, you can do the followings after you have D Drive or the very drive on the right side of system partition:
Right-click on D Drive and choose Delete volume, then confirm
And the entire D Drive is deleted, leaving nothing but space unallocated, then the option Extend Volume is not grayed out anymore, then click on it to extend.
As of the same, you can delete D Drive from diskpart, use the command Delete.
If you don’t want to delete any partition after backed up or a thought not to backup, you can use the alternative way to extend C Drive without deleting or formatting other partitions.
This disk managing tool is able to resize and move volume without data loss.
Download this program, install and run, or directly run it from the portable package, and choose D Drive, then:
click Resize/Move volume and shrink this volume.
Move unallocated space to the head of D Drive if you shrank the right handle, and then click on C Drive, Resize/Move volume on it to extend this partition.