Windows Server 2008 resize hard drive partition

Updated on: November 16, 2019

This article introduces how to resize hard drive in Windows Server 2008 r2 without losing data. Resize hard drive volume with 3 partition editor tools.

Many server administrators need to resize hard drive partition for Windows 2008 server, because this server is running a long time and one or more partitions are getting full. The first thing you should do is backing up, because there's potential data loss risk while resizing hard drive partition even with Windows built-in tools.

Secondly, find out your disk partition configuration, especially how many partitions in a disk, whether the partitions that you want to shrink and extend are on the same disk.

Resize hard drive partition with diskpart cmd

Diskpart is a command line tool that integrated from Windows XP, it contains many command to disk and partition. Generally speaking, it is easy to shrink hard drive partition, but you are very likely encounter issue while extending hard drive, because it has some limitations.

  • Diskpart cannot extend a partition by shrinking any other one. For example, to extend system partition C, there must be contiguous Unallocated space on the right, but the Unallocated space shrinking from D (or other volume) is nonadjacent to C drive.
  • The partition that you want to extend must be formatted with NTFS, otherwise, you cannot extend this partition even by deleting the right contiguous partition.

Follow the steps to resize hard drive partition with diskpart in Windows Server 2008:

Diskpart extend error

Resize partition drive with Disk Management

Unlike Diskpart that only lists single partitions with part of information, Disk Management lists partitions with more detailed information. The most important, it display all disks with graphical partition structure, so you'll see which partitions are in the same disk.

It is very easy to resize hard drive partition in Server 2008 Disk Management, but the same with diskpart, it only helps you create NTFS partition to create new or extend NTFS partition by deleting the right contiguous one.

Extend greyed

As you see in the screenshot, Extend Volume is grayed out for C and E drive after shrinking D, because the Unallocated space is non-contiguous to C and is on the left of E.

Follow the steps if you just want to shrink a volume to create new.

If you can delete the right adjacent partition, follow the steps to extend volume with Server 2008 Disk Management.

If there is no or you cannot delete the right adjacent partition, both Diskpart command and Disk Management are useless.

Resize hard drive volume with NIUBI Partition Editor

To resize hard drive partition in Windows Server 2008 (and R2), NIUBI Partition Editor is better choice, it has many advantages comparing with both Windows native tools and other third party software.

Comparing with Windows tools, it is much more powerful.

Comparing with other software, NIUBI Partition Editor is much safer and faster because of its unique technologies:

When there is free unused space in any partition on the same disk, follow the steps to resize hard drive partition in Windows Server 2008 R2:

Video guide

When there is no available free space in whole disk, follow the steps to copy to other disk and extend partition with additional space:

Video guide

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