How to increase or adjust dynamic disk system volume?

Have you learned how to increase or adjust the system volume for your dynamic disk if your system C: drive on the dynamic disk is running low on space? When search on forums you may find posts like "I have a 20GB system volume and a 40 GB data volume configured as one simple volume running Windows XP Professional. My C volume is running low on space cause I didn't realize XP was gonna be such a monster. However, the operating system Disk Manager will not allow me to increase the capacity of my system volume. I can only use the unallocated disk capacity to create a new volume. How can I solve this problem?"

You may fail to increase or adjust the dynamic disk system volume via disk management built in Windows itself, including Windows 2000/XP/2003/Windows 7. The Windows operating systems released later than Vista allow you to extend the system volume on the dynamic disk under certain conditions like it should have some unallocated space near the system partition. At present, most partition manager software cannot resize dynamic disk directly as the way for managing drives of dynamic disk is different from that of the basic disk. You are unable to use the third party software to resize dynamic disk, but do it in an indirectly way: convert dynamic disk to basic and then increase the system volume of the basic disk. Here I will give you an instruction about how to increase the system partition indirectly with EASEUS Partition Master.

How to increase the system volume on Dynamic Disk?

Case 1: Convert dynamic disk containing simple volumes to a basic disk.

EASEUS Partition Master can change dynamic disk containing simple volumes into a basic disk directly.

1. Launch EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition.

2. Select dynamic disk which you want to convert to basic disk on the disk map, click "Disk" on main menu and choose "Convert to Basic Disk" or right click the dynamic disk and choose "Convert to Basic Disk".

3. After you choose "Convert to Basic Disk", you will see the dynamic disk has become basic disk on the disk map.

4. Click "Apply" to convert dynamic disk to basic disk. After EASEUS Partition Master applies these changes, you will see the dynamic disk has become basic disk in Windows Disk Management. And then you can use "Resize/Move" feature to resize partitions on the basic disk.

5. After resizing the basic disk, you can convert them back to dynamic disk by Windows built-in disk management.

Case 2: Convert dynamic disk containing mirrored volumes to a basic disk.

EASEUS Partition Master can change dynamic disk containing mirrored volumes into a basic one indirectly. To convert mirrored volumes, you need to break mirrored volumes by using Windows Disk Management and then convert dynamic disk to basic disk with the "Convert to Basic Disk" feature of EASEUS Partition Master.

1. Right click "My Computer" and choose "Manage" -> "Storage" -> "Disk Management", right click the mirrored volumes and choose "Break Mirrored Volume" to break mirrored volumes or choose "Remove Mirror" to remove mirror. If the boot/system partition is on the mirrored volumes, you can only choose "Remove Mirror" to remove mirror. Please backup your important data before this operation.

2. After choosing "Break Mirrored Volume" or "Remove Mirror", the mirrored volumes on the dynamic disk which you want to convert to basic disk will become simple volumes. Follow the steps in Case 1 to complete converting dynamic disk containing simple volumes to basic disk.

3. After resizing the basic disk, you can convert them back to dynamic disk by Windows built-in disk management.

Tips:

1. This Convert to Basic Disk feature is unavailable in Linux bootable disk.

2. This Convert to Basic Disk feature can only process dynamic disk with simple and mirrored volumes. The other types of dynamic volume like spanned volume, striped volume are not supported. How to convert dynamic disk with mirrored volumes?

3. This Convert to Basic Disk feature can only support converting up to 4 simple volumes on dynamic disk. Because the basic disk based on MBR can only create up to 4 primary partitions.

4. After resizing the basic disk, partitions can be converted to Simple Volume or Mirrored Volume only, as Striped/Spanned/RAID5 dynamic volumes should be re-built in Disk Management.

5. All other operations are not available before "Convert to Basic Disk" is applied.

6. After converting, all volumes will be primary partitions.

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