This is a quick guide to resizing partitions when a server is out of space and has multiple partitions on 1 hard drive.

First verify the amount of free space on the separate partitions that exist on the hard drive you would like to resize.

As you can see here the D drive has plenty of free space that could be used on the C drive. This is a very common scenario on servers such as Dell when they are purchased with Windows preinstalled. I have no idea why Dell thinks this is acceptable and I’d like to know where they think installed applications, Windows Updates, and added server features should go.

There is no benefit to creating a bunch of Sym links and sending them to the D drive because if your server crashed you would still need to reinstall those applications and any application that has a database used for data storage usually gives the user the option to select a separate storage location so the application would still reside on the C partition and the data would reside on another partition.

Here we can see both partitions are on the same physical drive. This is necessary because you need somewhere to pull the free space from, however if this is a virtual machine than all you may need to do is resize the disk within VMWare vCenter and then resize the partition within Windows. This can often be done without a server reboot if vCenter will allow a resize without shutting down the virtual machine.

The application I prefer to use is Easeus Partition Master, you can not use the free version on a server OS. If you wear an eye patch and have a peg leg you can likely dig up a copy on the website that’s named after you.

This is the main interface which shows our Disk and Partitions. The easiest way to resize these partitions is to use the graphical disk representation at the bottom of the screen.

We first need to free up space on drive D so we can then give that free space to drive C.

To do this place your curser between the two drives until it changes its appearance and simply drag the drive D to the right creating a new chunk of Unallocated Space.

Once you have done this and are comfortable with the size of your new and smaller D drive you can repeat the process on the C partition which will cause it to grow in size.

After this is complete we need to press the Apply button at the top of the screen which will ask if you are sure you want to commit your changes. Note that no changes are made until you apply them.