hello all I am running out of disk space on my c drive, I have a second drive that has plenty of space that I would like to give to my c drive I can also install another drive if need be. I been reading the post on this u mean after all this time windows has not come up with a decent disk management a real disk management tool, I am reading post about using diskpart, really I must have missed something there must be a windows server tool out there that I am missing? I have space to give it but no option to attach it to c and there is no space in front of c. I can take away from my d drive which has nothing on there or add another drive. but I do not see option to give it to c drive.

Neil, if I understand correctly you are correct, there are some limitations such as not being able to extend a disk which contains page file or system files. In Windows 2003, you had to use diskpart to extend a disk to consume empty space presented at the end of the disk, typical disk scenario not including the system disk. In Windows 2008 R2 you can use the GUI for those operations. You can certainly create mount points to attach a second disk to a empty folder on C:\ but that it not what you are looking for. One clean option is to perform a full backup which is bare metal, replace smaller disk used for C:\ with similar make and model (which uses same driver) and perform restore to larger drive. Since we do a file based backup and not a sector based back I recall you can restore to take advantage of entire drive. You may want to reach out to your storage vendor and see what options are available for your array controller. If you are not using hardware RAID, its in your best interest to move in that direction.Dave Guenthner [MSFT] This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. http://blogs.technet.com/b/davguents_blog

Hello Any maloperation in using diskpart command to extend a system partition might cause irreparable problems. I agree with Dave that making a full server backup and restore to another larger HDD is the best practice in such situation. Thanks Zhang

how about a good third party tool? this might involve less process

Hi, There are many third party softwares available and Microsoft does not recommend or support those. Take a full backup of your server before performing the change. http://www.partition-tool.com/easeus-partition-manager/extend-system-partition.htm http://www.partitionwizard.com/resizepartition/increase-c-drive-partition.html Regards, Rafic If you found this post helpful, please give it a "Helpful" vote. If it answered your question, remember to mark it as an "Answer". This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties and confers no rights! Always test ANY suggestion in a test environment before implementing!

thanks guys for helping me on this. I tried out that first one, its free, I have two drives now, the option to add more space to C is an option because its a vm but will need to reboot to changes to take affect (not a option at this time production server) I can add another drive which I did but as far as I can tell the partition tool cant attach the free space to another drive. The other one is not freeware or try it out ware.

Hi, I heard of free partition manager for servers, named AOMEI Partition Assistant Lite Edition, easy to use. Of course, maybe its brand awareness is waiting to be improved, but free is the best I think.