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One of my ESXi VM’s is running Windows Server 2022 with desktop experience and is getting low on disk space. I shut it down, then using vSphere I increased the size of the virtual disk. I booted the server and went to disk management. It sees the extra space but it won’t let me extend the existing volume. Extend is grayed out but shrink is available. It will allow me to create a new volume but I don’t want to do that.

The VM is running on ESXi 7.0 U3 version:12288

8 Spice ups
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I believe the partition you want to extend needs to be directly beside the free space you want to extend into. If another partition is in between, it won’t allow it.

2 Spice ups
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Because there is no screen shot, I am going to say this is likely because the areas are not contiguous on the disk. It is common to see the recovery partition placed between the primary partition and the new storage.

Some people like to keep the recovery partition, but the reality is with a VM you can always mount an ISO of the install and do whatever recovery operations you need. I generally just delete the partition and extend the file system.

You do have the option of using other tools like GParted, boot to it and then restructure the partitions. But in the end I generally just remove the recovery partition.

In the event it is something else, you can post a screenshot of your disk management.

Hope that helps.

1 Spice up
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That should be my issue. Is it resolvable? This is what I see

b51f5260-cb25-4211-aa11-34fe38ff966b-Disks.jpg

1 Spice up
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Sounds good. I’ll give it a shot

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Yes, your recovery partition is causing the issue.

As I said, I generally just delete the recovery partition because A) on a VM I almost never use it, and B) If I needed to run recovery tools I would just mount the disk. In this case you can just delete it and then extend the space.

Otherwise you can use a partition tool (like GParted) to handle this, as Windows is natively unable to do so.

Before performing any major operations on a VM, be sure you have a working backup as well as a snapshot / checkpoint. Snapshots aren’t backups, so be sure you have both.

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It doesn’t give me the option to delete the partition :frowning:

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Looks like with WS2022 you need to use diskpart to remove.

https://www.reddit.com/r/vmware/comments/xvig5q/windows_server_2022_recovery_partition_how_did/
How to Delete or Create Windows Server 2022 Recovery Partition .

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I followed the reddit link and that did the trick thank you!