Users and administrators often encore a situation when existing diskspace is not enough in a partition. Lets learn together how to extend the logical volume? First of all you need to maker sure free space exists next to the volume you want to extend. If diskspace is not available you can destroy the next partition first, create some space. Then extend logical volume. We will use windows disk management console during this process.

In this example we are going to extend a 40 GB Hard disk to 45 GB using VMWare virtual environment and Windows Server 2019 Standard operating system. Same process is applicable on windows 10 and 11 etc. However desktops and laptops are usually not connected with storages. So free disk must be available or created.

Operating System Settings

Power on the machine and open server manager.

Open computer management and go to disk management.

Select the appropriate disk (Disk 0 in this case) and click on refresh. New disk size will appear automatically, if it was done by your storage or virtualization platform administrator from the backend.

Right click the drive and select extend volume.

Click next.

Add the available disk and click next.

Click finish and your disk is ready.

Hardware/Hypervisor Settings

Consult your storage admin to extend the LUN allocated to your operating system. In case of virtual environment, disk can be extended at hypervisor (e-g VMWare or Hyper-V). Later some configuration is done to extend volume at operating system level.

In case of enterprise environment using storages, VMware or Hyper-V your storage or hypervisor administrator need to extend the disk first. In this example we are using VMWare. Your scenario might be different. However process remains same. Use the option extend disk capacity and enter the new size. Then click on expand. This will increase the size of existing disk from 30GB to 45GB.

You see extend disk partition process was so easy. However there are complicated case as well. When you need to shrink the partition, claim some diskspace and add same same to another volume or partition. It my not be possible with windows default disk management tool. For such advance options you might require third party tools. If you want to go through that process, please have a look on our article “Resize Windows partition (Advance Options)“.