Addressing the "Partition Extends Beyond The End Of The Disk" issue

Situation

In some situations, the following warning or error message might appear during snapshot (shadow copy) creation for a local volume (could affect image-based backups) or a VM instance (could affect VM backups):

It means that a certain partition (volume) within the physical or virtualized disk's GPT (GUID Partition Table) is incorrectly laid out and requires readjustment. In most cases the culprit is one of the letter-assigned source volumes ("C:", "D:", or other volume chosen as a backup source).

Solution

In order to address this issue the best way, the following course of action is recommended:

1. Open Windows Disk Management tool by right-clicking "Start" button and clicking "Disk Management";

2. Right-click on the problematic volume and choose "Shrink Volume" option (volume will be automatically analyzed which could take a few minutes):

3. In the opened sub-window, specify to what extent the volume's size is going to be reduced and click "Shrink".

4. Once the procedure is complete, close the opened windows and reboot the machine (instance) during the closest available maintenance time frame.

It would be even better if you ensure that the problematic volume is defragmented (optimized) before taking the above steps:

1. Navigate to Windows tool "Defragment and Optimize Drives":

2. Proceed with "Optimize" (or "Analyze", then "Optimize") option for the problematic volume:

3. Proceed with volume shrink as described above.