Extend hard drive in Windows Server 2012

This article introduces how to extend hard drive in Windows Server 2012 R2. Resize and expand hard drive partition for Server 2012 without losing data.

Restrictions to extend hard drive in Server 2012 DM

When system partition C is running out of space, many people want to expand it without wasting a long time to recreate partitions and restore from backup. To help extend hard drive partition without losing data, Windows Server 2012 has native Diskpart command and GUI Disk Management tools.

However, both tools cannot extend a drive by shrinking another one.

Disk Management (and Diskpart command) can only help you reduce an allocated partition to create new, or extend hard drive by deleting the contiguous partition on the right. If you want to extend a hard drive by shrinking other one, it is impossible, because:

• While shrinking a partition, Unallocated space can only be generated on the right side.
• Extend Volume can only merge Unallocated space to the left contiguous partition.
• Only NTFS partitions are supported, FAT32 and any other types of partitions can't be extended even if there is right contiguous Unallocated space.

If there is no or you cannot delete the right contiguous partition, there's no way to extend hard drive volume in Server 2012 Disk Management or by diskpart command prompt.

Extend hard drive partition by moving free space

With partition editor software, you can shrink partition and make Unallocated space on either side. Unallocated space can be combined to any other partitions in the same disk. All you need to do is dragging and dropping on the disk map.

Download NIUBI Partition Editor and follow the steps in the video.

As long as there is available free unused space in the same disk, you can extend other drive partitions.

Expand hard drive by cloning to other disk

In some servers, there is no available space in entire hard disk. In that case, clone this disk to a larger one, then you can extend hard drive partitions with extra disk space. No software can extend a partition by adding space from another separated disk.

Follow the steps in the video:

Select corresponding method according to your disk partition configuration/structure.

Data safety and keeping online are most important to a server. To product data and help repartition hard drive faster, NIUBI Partition Editor has unique and innovative technologies:

• Virtual Mode - all operations will be listed as pending for preview, real disk partitions won't be modified until click Apply to confirm.
• Cancel-at-will - if you applied wrong operations, it doesn't matter, you can also cancel the ongoing operations without causing damage.
• 1 Second Rollback - if encounter any error while resizing partition, it automatically reverts server to original status in a flash.
• Advanced file-moving algorithm - resize and extend hard drive 30% to 300% faster, saving much time especially when there are large amount of files.

Besides shrinking and extending hard drive partitions, NIUBI Partition Editor helps you move, merge, copy, convert, defrag, hide, wipe, scan partition and much more.

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