In many servers, drive D: is used for programs and some Windows services. When it is getting full, you can increase free space from other partitions without wasting a long time to recreate partitions and restore from backup. To increase disk space of D drive on Windows Server 2008 R2, there are two kinds of tools - built-in Disk Management and third party software. Disk Management is safe but it only works under special condition. Disk partition software is much more powerful, but you'd better back up at first and run safe software. This article introduces how to increase D drive space in Server 2008 R2 without losing data.
How to increase D drive space without software
To increase D drive free space with Server 2008 Disk Management, your disk partition must meet the requirements:
- Drive D is formatted with NTFS.
- There must be other partition behind it on the same disk, in addition, this partition can be deleted.
- Both drive D and the right contiguous partition must be the same primary or logical partition
Learn why cannot extend volume in Server 2008 Disk Management.
The most common issue is that you cannot extend D drive by shrinking other partitions.
As you see in the screenshot, the 20GB unallocated and Free space are shrunk from C and E drive. When right clicking D drive, Extend Volume option is disabled.
This is because:
"Extend Volume" only works when there is adjacent unallocated space on the right. Therefore, the only way to increase D drive space in Windows Server 2008 without software is by deleting the right contiguous partition (E:).
When Extend Volume is enabled for D drive, simply follow the instructions in pop-up "Extend Volume Wizard" window via several clicks.
How to increase D drive free space from C or E
With third party software, there are no such restrictions. You can shrink any NTFS or FAT32 partition on the same disk to get unallocated space, and then combine into D drive, no matter they are contiguous or not, no matter these partitions are Primary or Logical.
However, as I said above, you should run safe partition software, because there is potential data loss risk while repartition hard drive. Better than other software, NIUBI Partition Editor has innovative technologies to protect system and data.
- 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, you can also cancel the ongoing operations without losing data.
- 1 Second Rollback - if any error is detected while resizing partition, it automatically reverts server to original status in a flash.
- Hot Clone - clone disk partition without rebooting to back up or migrate system and data.
Download NIUBI Partition Editor and you'll see all disk partitions with structure and other information on the right. There is drive C, D, E and a system reserved partition in Disk 0, original size of D is 30GB.
How to increase D drive space from C in Windows Server 2008 R2:
Steps 1: Right click system partition C: and select "Resize/Move Volume", in the pop-up window you have two options: drag right border towards left, or enter an amount directly in the box "Unallocated space after".
Then C drive is shrunk and unallocated space is made on the right.
Steps 2: Right click D: drive and select "Resize/Move Volume" again, drag left border towards left to combine unallocated space.
Then D drive space is increased to 50GB.
Steps 3: Click "Apply" on top left to take effect to real disk partitions.
If you want to add free space from E to D, it is similar, just drag and drop towards opposite direction.
Follow the steps in the video to increase D drive space from other partitions on the same disk:
How to increase D drive space with other disk
In some old servers, disk is not large and there's not enough free space in other partitions. In that case, you have two options:
- Move partition D to other larger disk, then disk space of original D drive can be given to C or other volume.
- Copy entire disk to another larger one, additional disk space will be shown as unallocated, which can be increased to D drive (and other partitions).
If you use any types of hardware RAID, do not break raid array or do any operations to raid controller, simply follow steps above.
To VMware/Hyper-V guest server, if there is enough free space in the disk, there's also no difference to increase D drive. If there is no available free space in the disk, you can increase VMDK/VHD virtual disk size with their own tools. After that, additional space will be also shown as unallocated on the end of original disk. Then you can increase D drive (and other partitions) without copying to other disk.
Besides shrinking, extending, moving and copying disk partition in Windows Server 2008/2012/2016/2019/2022/2025, NIUBI Partition Editor helps you do many other disk partition management operations.
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