Users and administrators often encore a situation when existing diskspace is not enough in a partition. In order to extend disk partition or volume, first of all you need to 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 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 if you want to extend disk of a workstation/laptop.

Hardware/Hypervisor Settings

First of all you need to extend the disk at storage level/hypervisor level. In this example we are using VMWare. Your scenario might be different. However principal 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.

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.

Right click the drive and select extend volume.

Click next.

Add the available disk and click next.

Click finish and your disk is ready.

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)“.