24) On the Secondary Partition of the system drive insure that the partition is marked “Unallocated” (Meaning the drive is not active). If the partition is active please proceed to step 25 if not please proceed to Step 26.
WARNING – Insure all the Server Folders have been moved off or at least backed up as described in steps 14 thru 18 or they will be permanently lost.
25) Right click on the Secondary Partition and ONLY THE SECONDARY PARTITION and click on the “Delete Volume” (If you were to do this on the Primary Partition all kinds of consequences which include rendering your home server useless will follow, however this option is “grayed out” on the System Partition). Click “Yes” to both warning boxes and the partition volume will be deleted.
26) Now proceed to the Primary partition of your system drive then right click, Choose “Extend Volume”
27) You will get the “Extend your Volume Wizard”, proceed by clicking “Next”.
28) At this point you have two options. Option 1 you can just accept the defaults which will extend your current entire System Partition to Cover your entire System Drive (As seen below);
or Option 2 go to the “Select the amount of space in MB” (Megabytes) box and only extend your system partition by a certain amount, My recommendation at least by another 60GB (or in this case 61440) to give you a total of 120 GB, Once you have decided click “Next”.
29) You will now get the completion window before the drive changes take effect click “Finish” to complete the changes
30) You should now notice the instantaneous change in your system partition size.
31) Once completed there should be No reboot involved and you can proceed with installing the rest of your New WHS 2011 or SBS 2011 Server.
Please Note – If you wish to put the moved Server Folders back on the Secondary Partition (Unless of course you extended the entire primary partition) just follow steps 14 thru 18 in the reverse order of putting the folders back, Once the secondary partition has been reformatted as described in steps 6 thru 10. The following information on this article was tested in a Virtual Environment for confirmation of technical accuracy, No production Servers were harmed in the making of this How To.
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