Expanding a Boot Drive’s Partition With Recovery Partition using MiniTool

Expanding a Boot Drive’s Partition With Recovery Partition using MiniTool

NOTE: the following uses third party software not supported by Enmotus. Please contact MiniTool if there are any issues or questions with using their software.

Summary

In some cases, a boot drive places a recovery partition at the end of a boot drive. Following a transform to a full tier FuzeDrive, it is quite common for this recovery partition to prevent the user from expanding the boot drive volume (C:) to take advantage of the additional capacity.

The following example shows how to expand a boot drive that looks like the following in Disk Manager in Windows following a transform to a FuzeDrive.

NOTE: If wishing to remove an SSD or fast tier device from a FuzeDrive, you can follow the opposite steps as summarized at the end of this article.

Below is an example of how the drive may look after converting to a FuzeDrive and the additional capacity has been added. An unallocated region of the disk is created which may be used for the additional capacity.


Steps to Move the Recovery Partition and Expand the C Drive

STEP 1: Download and install Minitool Partition Wizard.
STEP 2: Run Minitool and identify the recovery partition that needs to be moved.
[Note that Minitool counts drives starting with 1 rather than 0 like Windows Disk Management and our software, so the drive number will be one number higher.]


STEP 3: Move the Partition to the End of the FuzeDrive
 
STEP 4: Extend the C: volume to full the newly created unallocated area just above it



STEP 5: Apply all the Changes


 
STEP 6: On completion, close MiniTool and Check in Disk Manager that the C: is now expanded correctly


Manually Reducing the Size of the FuzeDrive to allow for a Remove operation.

The current versions of the FuzeDrive software automatically relocate a single recovery partition, however other partition types may not support automatic relocation. If you encounter an issue with Unfuze or convert to Single media mode (previously Remove Fast Media or Remove FuzeDrive), the following steps can be taken to create the room needed at the end of the drive to support an unfuze or removal of the fast drive.

STEP 1: Download and run Minitool Partition Wizard.
STEP 2: Using Minitool's shrink option, reduce the size of the C: volume by the size of the SSD that is to be removed e.g. 128GB. Add 2 GB for additional padding (i.e. 130GB).
[Note that Minitool counts drives starting with 1 rather than 0 like Windows Disk Management and our software, so the drive number will be one number higher.]
STEP 3: Use Minitool's option to move the recovery partition so that is located right next to the resized C:.
STEP 4: You should now have an unallocated space at the end of the drive. Retry the Remove Fast Media option.