Introduction
While rebuilding my WHS 2011 server for the 2nd time one thing I had realized was if I was going to be adding more applications to my home servers 60GB’s system partition (3 times more than the 20GB in WHSV1) I was going to need more drive space on my system partition. While 60GB’s is allot more room than WHSV1 I noticed that after doing just the installation and completing the updates that my system partition was almost half full. Sure I can direct most of the installs to another partition or even another system drive but the installs still direct some of the installation folders to the “C” drive of your Server.
I then once again realized “Hey! This new version of Windows Home Server and Small Business Server resides on the Windows Server 2008 Code” and also remembered that the 2008 code had the ability to shrink or in my case EXTEND the partition on the drive.
After doing some testing in a Virtual Test Server of WHS 2011 I found this worked without a hitch. Something I would not been able to do in WHSV1 for 2 reasons one resizing partitions was not available in the 2003 code and two the Drive Extender would have already taken up the secondary partition.
Best time to do this is right after your initial install of the WHS 2011 or SBS 2011 Essentials server BEFORE installing any apps or moving data to your secondary partition on the Primary Drive.
Disclaimer
The How to information is intended as a guide or helping resource to those who are Extending their System Partition of the Primary Hard Drive on SBS 2011 Essentials or WHS 2011 Server. There is no 100% guarantee that this will work as attended and could possibly make your system partition unusable. I assume no responsibility for any consequences of extending the system partition.
Prerequisites
– Install and format a Secondary internal drive attached to the Home Server
– Keyboard, Mouse, and Monitor or Remote Desktop
Installation Instructions
1) Shutdown Your Home Server and Install a Secondary Hard Drive (Disregard this step if there is already a secondary drive installed)
2) Once the Home server has booted up and you have logged in click the Windows Logo (Start Menu), then go to the right hand side and right click on “computer”, and then click “Manage”.
3) If this is a new drive your home server will automatically start the “Initialize” Disk Box as seen below
4) Make sure that all selected disks are checked and if the disk is less than 2TB’s that you choose “MBR” (Master Boot Record). If the disk is greater than 2TB’s choose GPT (GUID Partition Table), but remember anything bigger than 2TB Home Server will by default split the drive into 2 different partitions.
5) Once the disk (or disk) initialize right click on the new Drive and click on “New Simple Volume…”
6) As soon as the “New Simple Volume Wizard” Starts click on “Next”
Brilliant, thanks John for the clear guide. Followed your instructions and successfully added 90 GBs to the primary partition of my WHS 2011.
Glad my guide was a help.
Great Guide John, Problem is that my secondary partition is marked as System Active Primary Partition, this seems to be preventing me from deleting or formatting it ?
Great Guide John, Problem is that my secondary partition is marked as System Active Primary Partition, this seems to be preventing me from deleting or formatting it ?
Great Guide John, Problem is that my secondary partition is marked as System Active Primary Partition, this seems to be preventing me from deleting or formatting it ?
Then that maybe a problem since that is the boot partition. you will need to delete the primary partition instead if that is the case if the WHS 2011 files are not on the primary partition. If so then you will need make the primary partition the “Active primary partition” before you go ahead with the procedure in my document.
Great guide, Well written and explained. Thank You.
Thanks Bruno, Glad the article was able to help you.
Thank you very much – great post – just extended my c: drive with no issues. Thanks again.
Glad it worked for you J
Glad the article worked out for, thanks for the feedback!
This is a great article. Following this, I have installed a new sata drive, moved data, extended my system partition to 300GB (don’t know why!), created a new simple volume on disk 0, move all the data back to disk 0, removed disk 1 and all OK, no issues whatsoever!
I am so glad that I have seen this this while the DATAPART was still around 60GB as moving those was not too time consuming and complicated.
I’m glad this article was able to help you out, thanks for the comments!
Excellent article & very informative just what I need to resolve this issue. By using this article I was able to attach a 2 TB drive move my shared folders to the new drive & extend my primary partition. This woks great & you don’t need to spend money on Partition Magic or some other expensive disk application.
thanks
Excellent article & very informative just what I need to resolve this issue. By using this article I was able to attach a 2 TB drive move my shared folders to the new drive & extend my primary partition. This woks great & you don’t need to spend money on Partition Magic or some other expensive disk application.
thanks
Thanks brackmr, I’m glad that the contents of the article were able to help you acomplish your task. As explained in the article this feature has been included in all versions of Windows since Vista’s beta testing days. Partition Magic was a great tool until symantec brought it out and they stopped supporting it.
thank you very very much! I was down to 300kb on my system partition with an further unused 1.7Gb on D, and couldn’t extend C: – reason being that D: although empty, had a paging file set up so couldn’t be deleted. Now sorted and I’m very grateful