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 the forum 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: copy dynamic volume or 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?

EASEUS Partition Master may help you realize both copy dynamic system volume to the basic and then increase the system volume on the basic disk to solve low disk or disk replacement problems. Just free download a trial version to have a test now.

To increase or adjust system volume on dynamic disk, you can clone dynamic system volume to basic disk first, and then extend system partition on basic directly. Following will take the EASEUS Partition Master Server Edition as example:

1. Install the EASEUS Partition Master Server and launch the software.

2. Find the copy dynamic system volume function in the tool bar: click Wizard -> Copy Dynamic Volume or click Copy Dynamic Volume on the menu.

3. EASEUS Partition Master will list all existing volumes. Select the dynamic system volume that you want to clone and click "Next".

4. Select an unallocated space on a basic disk and click "Next".

5. Increase the system volume you copied. You can drag the borderline to adjust the system partition or drag the central place to move the partition. Click Finish and Apply to complete dynamic system disk copy and partition resize.

6. Click "Apply" button and tick the check-box in the pop-up window.

7. Replace the source dynamic disk that contains the system volume with the destination basic disk, and then boot the computer. (You may see the copy of C: partition has been extended.)

8. Convert the basic disk back to dynamic.

9. You may see that the system volume has been extended successfully in the Disk Management tool.

For different volume types, the situations are different when converting basic disk back to dynamic:

Simple Volume

After copying the Simple Volume to a basic disk, you can resize the partition. You may also convert it back to Simple Volume in Disk Management after this operation.

Mirror Volume

If you want to convert the Mirror Volume back after being copied and resized on the basic disk, you can convert it to Simple Volume in Disk Management first, then adding mirror with another dynamic disk.

Striped/Spanned/RAID5 Volume

If you want to convert them back to dynamic volumes after being copied and resized on the basic disk, these volumes should be converted to Simple Volume or Mirror Volume.

Tips:

1. This feature works under Windows only, and it is not supported under bootable CD but WinPE based bootable CD.

2. The source volume should be FAT or NTFS file system.

3. If the source volume is the system boot volume, please make sure there is no boot partition on the destination disk, otherwise the system on destination partition may fail to boot after copy.

4. The destination disk should be larger than the used space of source dynamic volume.

If you still have questions about increasing your system volume on the dynamic disk, please contact support@partition-tool.com.

Related Articles:

• How to extend dynamic system volume on Windows Server 2003?
• How to safely extend or enlarge dynamic disk/volume under Windows?
• How to transfer data from dynamic disk directly without backup and restore?
• How to partition dynamic disk?
• Three Ways to Revert Dynamic Disk Back to Basic Disk under Windows xp/2000/2003/Vista
• How to backup your dynamic disk with one click?