extending volume in windows 11

[tameratta]

I have VMfusion player ver. 13. , intially i have set during installartion the harddisk size to 75 GB,  and i ahve installed windows 11 ARM , later  i needed to increase the size of the  drive (c:) in the window so in the setting of VMware, i have increse the size to 100GB, but it  did not reflected to the size of (C:) in the window and srtill the same size (75GB) , so how o solve this issue?

[RDPetruska]

Exactly the same way as if you added a larger hard drive to a physical computer... The OS needs to run disk partitioning software to recognize that there is additional disk space available, and to either create a new partition in the space or extend the existing partition to fill it.  For Windows, run Disk Management.

[Nick Merlevede]

You can expand the volumes from the Disk Management in Computer Management. Right-click on Volume and click Extend Volume. For more information, see Microsoft's documentation.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/disk-management/extend-a-basic-volume

 

[Technogeezer]

With a virtual machine, you have the complication of the Windows Recovery partition. Standard Windows disk partitioning puts the recovery partition at the end of the disk. When you increase the size of a Virtual disk through Fusion, the additional space now sits at the end of the disk and the Recovery partition sits between your existing C drive and the free space  

The problem with this is that Windows Disk Management needs the free space to be adjacent to the disk partition to be expanded. The Recovery partition blocks the expansion because it sits between the C drive and the free space.

You can delete the Recovery partition in Disk Management to allow Windows to expand the C drive. Just make sure you have a Windows installation ISO handy in case you need to repair your VM. 

Or you can leave about a GB or so of free space after you expand your C drive and search for instructions on the web on how to reinstall the recovery partition. 

[RDPetruska]

"You can delete the Recovery partition in Disk Management to allow Windows to expand the C drive. Just make sure you have a Windows installation ISO handy in case you need to repair your VM."

Or just create a backup (or more) of your VM that you can restore if it ever gets corrupted.  No reason to take up space for a recovery partition at all that way.  Similar to why I always turn off System Restore on my Windows VMs... no reason to chew up that disk space creating backups of files, which are only all contained within files on the host computer anyway.

[ColoradoMarmot]

I've also used EaseUS partition manager to move the recovery partition to where it belongs instead of where windows puts it (it's free, but more for advanced users).

[tameratta]

i have tried to install theEaseUS partition manager, but it gives me message that" Fisk device not detected by EaseUS partition Master, please reinstall the the program", and this is the case for any third party software  for volume managing. 

[Mario Adario]

Same here, both EaseUS and Minitool Partion will not run, they don't see the drive. Is there a fix? Why don't they run?

[Technogeezer]

If you're running Windows 10 or later (either Intel/x86_64 or ARM), see  https://thedxt.ca/2023/06/moving-windows-recovery-partition-correctly/ for a procedure for moving the recovery partition using the tools built into Windows. 

You don't say what version of Windows and whether it's Windows x86_64 or Windows ARM.  Both those tools are built for Windows x86_64. They may not work well or at all on Windows 11 ARM. 

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- Paul (technogeezer)
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