Extend Windows VirtualBox partition

Question

I want to expand the size of my Windows VM under VirtualBox. I expanded the size of the volume following the steps here, that is,

VBoxManage modifyhd YOUR_HARD_DISK.vdi --resize SIZE_IN_MB

but I am unable to expand the partition in the guest VM. "Extend volume" is grayed out. How to proceed?

Here is a screen shot of my guest OS Disk Management.

Answer 1

1. PLEASE BACKUP YOUR VDI FILE (VIRTUAL HARD DISK) FIRST
2. boot the guest OS and open Disk Management again
3. delete the recovery partition
4. right click on the C partition
5. from the context menu select Extend volume
6. Increase the size to accommodate the one you added. See here for images, starting from step 5 or 6.

After that your Windows partition size should have increased.

Answer 2

You need contiguous space to expand any partition. I would go into gparted, create a 450 MB partition at the disk, and then move the recovery partition to that new partition, or delete it if you don't need it.

Once you have free space adjacent to the windows partition, you should be able to expand it to incorporate that free space. I'm not sure, but you may need to then go into Windows to the disk manager and tell it to use the full size of the disk.