Knowledge Base

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Article Summary: This article provides information on an issue that may prevent a partition residing on a basic disk from being extended in Windows Server.

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To extend a partition on a Windows server, it is often necessary to delete another partition that resides on the same disk (after backing up the data in that partition, of course). After performing the deletion, if these partitions reside on a basic disk, you may find that the resulting space is not available when you try to extend the remaining partition.

When this issue occurs, the lower pane of the Disk Management console on the affected server looks similar to this:



On the server shown in the image above, the C: partition can only be extended into the 4GB of unallocated space immediately after it. The 28GB of free space is not available, even though it does not already contain a partition. The reason for this is that the free space is enclosed in an extended partition, shown by the dark green border around it.

The extended partition was created automatically by Windows when the partition that previously existed within it was created. This is necessary in order for more than three partitions to exist on a basic disk. Additional partitions will be created as logical drives within the extended partition.

In order to fully extend the C: drive to fill the remaining space on disk 0, the extended partition must first be deleted. To delete the extended partition, right click anywhere inside it, select Delete Partition, and confirm the deletion when prompted:



After the partition has been deleted, Disk Management will show contiguous unallocated space in its place:



The partition can then be extended into the unallocated space.

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