Today's hard drives feature jaw-dropping amounts of space, but no matter how big your drive, you'll be amazed at how quickly application/Windows update installs, browser caches, and temporary files can eat up your free space and clutter your system.
After running Windows 2003 Server for a period, the system C drive runs out of space. If there is no free space on the system partition, Operating System runs much slower immediately and you cannot install any updates or other applications. The worst, system may crash if extremely low free space remains.
The easy and fast way to solve this problem permanently is extending the system C drive. Fortunately, nowadays you can extend C drive in Windows 2003 Server without deleting or formatting.
How to extend C drive in Windows 2003 Server?
Different with Windows 2008 Server, there is no shrink and extend feature under Server 2003 Disk Management. In fact, you cannot extend C drive by shrinking other data partition under Server 2008, I don't know why Microsoft add a semi-finished tool. So to extend C drive in Windows 2003 Server, you need third party Server partition software, such as Partition Magic Server.
In technical forums, many professionals recommend Partition Magic Server. Based on the enhanced data protection technology and copy wizard built in, you don't need to worry about the data security. Besides, It is able to extend NTFS C drive without reboot to maximize the server performance and minimize the downtime.
How to extend Server 2003 C drive with Partition Magic Server?
– It is extremely easy to resize Windows 2003 Server partition. You just need to drag and move on the disk map to shrink an existing data partition to get some Unallocated space, and then extend the system partition with this space, no need to delete or reformat partitions.
– Any operations you do on the Server will be listed in the "Operations Pending" column for you to preview.
– If the 2003 Server system partition is NTFS, you can extend it witout rebooting.
Steps to extend Windows 2003 C drive without deleting or formatting:
Check disk partition layout under Disk Management. (Right-click 'My Computer' > 'Manage' > 'Storage' > 'Disk Management'.
Step 1: Launch Partition Assistant Server, you'll see all disks and partitions that connected to your Server and free space, used space and other properties of each partition.
Right-click the partition you want to shrink and select 'Allocate Free Space', or click the feature shortcut on left 'Partition Operations' panel.
Step 2: In the pop up window, select how much free space to shrink, and which drive to add free space to.
After click OK, 14.09GB free space has shrank from G: and added to C drive.
Click 'Apply' on top left to proceed resizing operation.
In the pop up window, you'll see all pending operations.
If there is no mistake, click 'Proceed', after several minutes, partition resizing completed. Check in disk management.
Now you have a "new" Server that can be used for a long time again.
Note: This software is commercial. Learn more about Partition Magic Server from the vendor's website.