

Lots of people confuse “shrink” with “compact” for virtual hard disks. The VHDX “Shrink” Operation Means Something Different than “Compact” Making a virtual hard disk smaller requires a significant level of effort. If need to remove an entire disk, you can do that easily. The most difficult resource to remove from a Hyper-V virtual machine is drive space.

On the other hand, you have more work to do if you need to take resources away. You can add or grow almost all virtual resources with very little, and sometimes no impact. If you’re using a dynamic disk, this option is perfect for extending volumes.I have a standing recommendation for virtual machine resource allocation: start small. Well, Shrink Volume is capable of creating unallocated space, but the created one cannot be used for extending any volume on a basic disk. Here’re the solutions: Disk Management Extend Volumeĭisk Management requires continuous unallocated space to the partition you’d like to extend, so when the Extend Volume option grayed out, we have to delete the partition next to it so we can create continuous unallocated space, you may argue that the Shrink Volume option too can make space unallocated, why don’t I use that option instead This is the common problem in Disk Management when some partition (C Drive) is on low disk space, the Extend Volume option is grayed out while other partitions still have plenty of free space. In this page, we’ll fix both of the problems with the conventional way and the software method Can't Extend Volume


When we say can’t resize partition we mostly mean can’t extend a volume that is running out of space with the default partition manager - Disk Management, and there’re situations that not only the Extend Volume option can’t work but also the Shrink Volume option can’t work either.
