What is 0xC038001A

ERROR_VOLMGR_EXTENT_ALREADY_USED

Sometimes, an extra chunk of storage exists on a hard drive. You can use that unallocated portion of disk space to make a drive’s main volume larger.

To know whether you have unallocated space on your disk drive, you can look at the drive in the Disk Management console window.

What may not be obvious is that you can use any chunk of unallocated storage on any drive to make any other drive larger. You can even combine unused chunks from several hard drives to increase the storage capacity of a single drive. To make any or all of that happen, follow these steps:

• Open the Disk Management console window.
  • Open the Control Panel.
  • Open the Administrative Tools window. In Windows 7, choose System and Security and then Administrative Tools. In Windows Vista, choose System and Maintenance and then Administrative Tools. In Windows XP, open the Administrative Tools icon.
  • Open the Computer Management icon. In Vista, click Continue or type the administrator’s password.
• Choose Disk Management.
• Right-click the volume you want to extend. The volume can be extended only when it dwells on a hard drive not currently in use and where an unallocated portion of storage is available somewhere else on the computer.
• Choose the command Extend Volume. The Extend Volume Wizard opens.
• Click the Next button. The next screen of the wizard allows you to select chunks of unallocated space on hard drives in your PC.
• Choose the chunks of unallocated space to add to the existing drive. Any unallocated space on the current drive (the one you’re extending) already shows up in the Selected column (on the right side of the window). Any additional unallocated space on other drives shows up in the Available column. Use the Add or Remove buttons to choose which unallocated volumes to use. If the Next button isn’t available, the value specified by Select the Amount of Space in MB is too high. Set it to a lower value.
• Click the Next button.
• Click the Finish button. As if by magic, the size of the drive instantly increases, by grabbing up all the unallocated portions.
• Close the Disk Management console window.

Use Diskpart.exe to extend a data volume in Windows Server 2003, in Windows XP, and in Windows 2000

You can use the Diskpart.exe utility to manage disks, partitions, and volumes from a command-line interface. You can use Diskpart.exe on both Basic disks and Dynamic disks. If an NTFS volume resides on a hardware RAID 5 container that can add space to the container, you can extend the NTFS Volume with Diskpart.exe while the disk remains a Basic disk.

Use the extend command to incorporate unallocated space into an existing volume while preserving the data.

The following are the requirements for the extend command:

• The volume must be formatted with the NTFS file system.

• For Basic volumes, the unallocated space for the extension must be the next contiguous space on the same disk.

• For Dynamic Volumes, the unallocated space can be any empty area on any Dynamic disk on the system.

• Only the extension of data volumes is supported. System or boot volumes may be blocked from being extended, and you may receive the following error:

  Diskpart failed to extend the volume. Please make sure the volume is valid for extending

• You can't extend the partition if the system page file is located on the partition. Move the page file to a partition that you don't want to extend.

To extend a partition or volume, first select the volume to give it the focus, and then specify how large to make the extension. To extend a volume, follow these steps:

1. At a command prompt, type diskpart.exe.

2. Type list volume to display the existing volumes on the computer.

3. Type Select volume <volume number> where <volume number> is number of the volume that you want to extend.

4. Type extend [size=n] [disk=n] [noerr]. The following section describes the parameters:

   • size=n

     The space, in megabytes (MB), to add to the current partition. If you don't specify a size, the disk is extended to use all the next contiguous unallocated space.

   • disk=n

     The dynamic disk on which to extend the volume. Space equal to size=n is allocated on the disk. If no disk is specified, the volume is extended on the current disk.

   • noerr

     For scripting only. When an error is thrown, this parameter specifies that Diskpart continue to process commands as if the error didn't occur. Without the noerr parameter, an error causes Diskpart to exit with an error code.

5. Type exit to exit Diskpart.exe.

When the extend command is complete, you should receive a message that states that Diskpart successfully extended the volume. The new space should be added to the existing drive while maintaining the data on the volume.

In Windows XP and Windows 2000, you can't use Diskpart.exe to extend a simple volume on a Dynamic disk that was originally created on a Basic disk. You can extend only simple volumes that were created after the disk was upgraded to Dynamic disk. If you try to extend a simple volume on a Dynamic disk that was originally created on a Basic disk, you receive the following error message. This restriction was removed in Windows Server 2003.

Diskpart failed to extend the volume.
Please make sure the volume is valid for extending

Extend the boot partition in Windows Server 2008

To extend the boot partition in Windows Server 2008, follow these steps:

1. Click Start > Server Manager.
2. In the navigation pane, expand Storage, and then click Disk Management.
3. In the details pane, right-click the volume that you want, and then click Extend Volume.
4. Follow the instructions in the Extend Volume Wizard to extend the boot partition.