VPS: Extending the disk (partition) on Windows Server
This guide was created with the following products:
(Details may vary with products from different providers but the main concepts remain the same)
Introduction
Windows OS provides built-in disk and partition management allowing you to easily perform a wide variety of disk management actions including extending partitions, splitting disks and more. Part of this is the ability to extend partitions, which is particularly important after upgrading storage capacity for your Windows server. In this guide, we will cover the process of extending a partition on your Windows server.
Preparation
Begin by connecting to your Windows server via RDP. If you need help doing this, please refer to our Initial Access (RDP) guide.
There are two methods of managing disks and partitions, one is through the Disk Management utility tool and the other is through diskpart CLI. The Disk Management tool provides a GUI version of Diskpart which can perform most of the common actions, including extending partitions. However, for advanced users, diskpart could be utilised as it is much more extensive and powerful versus the tool.
Extending Partition
In various scenarios, it may be necessary to extend your existing partition to make use of new disk space. One of these scenarios is upgrading your server's disk space which by default will not be assigned until you extend your main drive partition.
We recommend following the Disk Management utility tool method as it is much easier, especially for beginners. This process is safe and does not affect data at all.
- Via Disk Management (GUI)
- Via Diskpart (CLI)
Begin by opening the Disk Management tool. Simply search for this in the start menu, or alternatively open it via run by pressing Windows Key + R and entering diskmgmt.msc followed by confirm.
With the tool open, right-click on the main partition and select the Extend Volumne action which will open a new wizard menu.
The main boot drive will always be the C: drive.
In the wizard select Next which will take you to setup page allowing you to allocate how much space you wish to add. By default, Windows will automatically populate this to the total unallocated space which is ideal.
Therefore you can select Next again and lastly select Finish to complete the process.
Once the process is complete, the current configuration is displayed again in Disk Management with updated disk size.
Begin by opening a command prompt as administrator. Search for this in the windows start menu, right-click and select Run as administrator.
Simply run the diskpart command to enter the CLI utility. Once the utility is loaded, run list disk to return a list of all currently connected disks.
Next run select disk [disk_number] replacing [disk_number] with the number of the drive from the previous list that you wish to extend.
The main boot drive will always be the C: drive.
With the disk selected, run list volume to return a list of all volumes from the selected drive. Find the volume that you wish to extend and then run select volume [volume_number] replacing [volume_number] with the number of the volume from the previous list.
With both the drive and volume now selected, you can proceed with extending the volume using the following command. You can either run the command alone to utilise all unallocated space or specify a size.
# Extend to all unallocated space
extend
# Extend to a specific size (10240 = 10240MB = 10GB)
extend size=10240
Upon success, you should see the volume size increase when listing disks again and viewing in file explorer. To quit the CLI, simply run the quit command.
Conclusion
You have successfully extended your main partition on your disk to utilise all disk space. For further questions or assistance, please don't hesitate to contact our support team, which is available daily to assist you! 🙂