8

I have a Windows 10 VM on a Mac using VMWare Fusion. I just extended the disk from 60 GB to 80GB. Now I'm trying to figure out how to add that space to my C: drive. The option to "Extend Volume..." is grayed out because there's a "Healthy (Recovery Partition)" between my C: partition and the new unallocated space.

screenshot

Is there any way to add this new space to the C: drive without using expensive third party software?

Improve this question
4
  • Buying partitioning software hasn’t been necessary for years now, with GParted and whatnot. However, using this method will take a long time and probably completely expand your virtual hard disk. IMHO, just doing away with the recovery partition is the best method.
    – Daniel B
    Commented Jul 10, 2018 at 13:34
  • Thanks. How do I remove the recovery partition? When I right click the only option I see is "Help".
    – Patrick McElhaney
    Commented Jul 10, 2018 at 13:41
  • @PatrickMcElhaney - After making a backup of your virtual machine's virtual HDD, I suggest using Gparted, to delete the partition.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Jul 10, 2018 at 14:13
  • 1
    You can delete the partition from a command prompt using diskpart
    – Appleoddity
    Commented Jul 10, 2018 at 14:27

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
7

From the comments, it sounds like:

  1. It can't be done with Windows' built in Disk Management tool.
  2. The de facto solution is "just use GParted", which is free, open-source, and cross platform.

The suggestion to delete the recovery partition using the built-in diskpart (more here on how to use DiskPart to remove the recovery partition) command line tool worked for me, so in this case I ended up not needing to worry about non-contiguous partitions.

Improve this answer
1
  • For the case of Parallels, indeed simply deleting the Recovery partition is a great solution, since we're taking full HDD backups anyway (snapshots/copies of the whole VM). Obviously this would not be a good solution if Windows were the primary/host OS (in which case gparted is the best option it seems)!
    – Demis
    Commented Apr 7, 2020 at 20:55

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .