AOMEI Partition Assistant
Effective Ways to Fix Disk Management Windows 10 not Working
When the Disk Management Windows 10 not working or not responding, you can try to follow methods to make it work properly or turn to another disk management tool as a workaround.
By Cherry / Updated on May 12, 2023
Scenario: Disk Management Windows 10 not working
“I am using Windows 10 computer. I opened Disk Management via Windows + R, but nothing showed on screen except for a message saying "Unable to connect to Virtual Disk Service". I can't see the status of my disk, can someone tell me what to do?”
Actually, Windows 10 has many problems such as 100% disk usage and sometimes the Disk Management won’t load or work on Windows 10, and you got the error “Unable to Connect to Virtual Disk Service” or “Disk Management could not start Virtual Disk Service (VDS) on...”. Fortunately, there are some ways that can help you solve the problem that Disk Management not responding.
How to fix Disk Management not working properly Windows 10
Sometimes, Disk Management won’t work due to file corruption. If your system files are corrupted, you might have to run DISM or SFC scan to repair them. Here you can find 3 methods to fix Disk Management not working or responding in Windows 10.
│ Method 1. Replace corrupted system files with good one
If there are some missing or corrupt system files on your PC, the Disk Management Windows 10 may not work, either. In this case, you can run the system file checker (SFC) to scan all protected system files and replace incorrect versions with correct Microsoft versions. Do as following steps:
1. Pressing "Windows + X" simultaneously, select "Search", type "cmd", run it as administrator.
2. In the Command Prompt, type in "sfc /scannow" and press Enter.
3. System File Checker will scan your system and if any problem found will be noted on the Command Prompt. You should see the following on-screen messages:
Beginning the system scan. This process will take some time.
Beginning verification phase of system scan.
Verification % complete.
Once the scan has completed you will receive an on-screen message resembling one of the following:
…found no integrity violations
…found corruption but repaired it
…found corruption that it could not repair
│ Method 2. Perform DISM scan
If SFC scan doesn’t solve your issue, you can try to run a DISM scan.
1. Open Command Prompt as administrator.
2. When the Command Prompt window pops up, type DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth and press Enter.
The progress will take about 20 minutes or more, don’t interrupt it. Once the scan is finished, check whether the Disk Management Windows 10 not working problem persists or not.
│ Method 3. Fixing Disk Management Not Working From Services Window
There is another way that you can use to fix Disk Management not working in Windows 10 - Fix it from Services Window. Here are the step-by-step guide for how to do it.
1. In the Search box, type "services.msc" and press Enter key.
2. Scroll down to "Remote Access Connection Manager", double-click on it.
3. From Startup type drop list select "Disabled" then click OK.
4. Then, scroll down to "Remote Access Auto Connection Manager" and double click on it.
5. From Startup type drop list select "Disabled" then click OK as we did in step 3.
6. Then, scroll down to "Virtual Disk" and double-click on it.
7. From Startup type drop list select either "Manual" or "Automatic" then click OK.
8. Restart your computer, then try to open Disk Management tool.
Workaround when Windows 10 Disk Management not working
Although Disk Management is a built-in tool that is able to help you manage hard disk partitions without rebooting system and any interruption, sometimes, it may not work as you expected: Disk Management stuck on loading disk configuration; Disk Management takes a long time to load; Disk Management not initialized, showing anything and so on.
Besides, it also has many restrictions on disk partition management, so many users have met the problems such as Extend Volume greyed out; Shrink Volume greyed out; New Simple Volume greyed out, cannot convert MBR to GPT disk, etc. In order to avoid all those problems, here we introduce you a more powerful disk management tool: AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard. This free partition manager makes up the shortages of Disk Management in Windows 11/10/8/7, for instance, it is able to:
✎ Shrink and extend not only NTFS and RAW partition, but also the FAT32 partition;
✎ Extend partition with adjacent or non-adjacent unallocated space via the “Merge Partitions”;
✎ Convert MBR and GPT without deleting partitions on the disk.
With a very friendly user-interface shown as the following picture, both computer newbies and experts can easily finish the disk partition management operations.
Besides making up the shortages of Disk Management, the AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard also comes with many advanced features that Disk Management does not offer. They include:
● Format large hard drive of up to 2TB to FAT32 file system;
● Convert FAT32 and NTFS file systems without reformatting;
● Clone partition or hard drive to transfer data between different partitions or disks;
● Migrate OS from MBR to MBR hard drive (HDD or SSD);
● Create bootable media to repair Windows startup issues;
● Create Windows To Go USB drive with ISO files.
● ......
Those features can satisfy almost all your requirements and get rid of “Windows 10 Disk Management not working” problem.
If you need more features, you can upgrade to Professional Version. It can allocate free space from one drive to another, convert boot disk between MBR and GPT without reinstallation for Windows 11 upgrade, split partition, quick partition a hard drive, etc.
If your machine is based in Windows Server 2022, 2019, 2016, 2012, 2008, 2003, you can turn to AOMEI Partition Assistant Server Edition. You can first download the free Standard edition to have a try.
