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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.

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

Patrick McElhaney
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  • 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 Jul 10 '18 at 13:34
  • Thanks. How do I remove the recovery partition? When I right click the only option I see is "Help". – Patrick McElhaney Jul 10 '18 at 13:41
  • @PatrickMcElhaney - After making a backup of your virtual machine's virtual HDD, I suggest using Gparted, to delete the partition. – Ramhound Jul 10 '18 at 14:13
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    You can delete the partition from a command prompt using `diskpart` – Appleoddity Jul 10 '18 at 14:27

1 Answers1

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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.

Tiago Martins Peres
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Patrick McElhaney
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  • 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 Apr 07 '20 at 20:55