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rgny
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Increase Hard Drive Space on a VM Guest OS second Hard Drive

I am running Vsphere, with esx 4.0. I have a VM with a Guest OS of Win 2003. I have ran out of hard drive space on the Hard Disk number 2, The Disk is Provisioned as Think. I have increase the size through Edit Settings. When I check in in Disk Manager I see the other 80GB I gave it. When I go to use GParted Live CD, it will not allow me to resize the drive. I done this resize before using GParted and never ran into this issue. Is there another way to increase the size. Also I don't know if this matters, but this was p-to-v (physical to virtual conversation)

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Troy_Clavell
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to add a bit more. I agree, use the build in windows tool, diskpart. And if this isn't your C: drive then you can't just use diskpart and expand the volume while the VM is online.

However, with that said. If there is a single HDD presented to the guest and it's partitioned within windows, the only way to increase would be to use converter.

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FranckRookie
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Hi Rgny,

To extend a partition or volume, you can use the Diskpart command line utility from within Windows. You can do it on a running server as long as it is not the system disk. You must first select the volume to give it the focus, and then you can 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 describes the parameters:

    • size=n : The space, in megabytes (MB), to add to the current partition. If you do not specify a size, the disk is extended to take up all of 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 did not occur. Without the noerr parameter, an error causes Diskpart to quit with an error code.

  5. Type "exit" to quit Diskpart.exe.

Regards

Franck

RParker
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Forget gparted, use diskpart (which is included with windows).

Just power off the VM, add the disk to another VM windows. Run disk part from command line.

diskpart /rescan ( to check for new hardware)

then do diskpart volume list (you should see the new drive)

diskpart select volume (whatever the drive letter is)

then diskpart extend.

done.

Power off the other VM, remove the disk, power on both VM's. Simple

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RParker
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follow these steps:

no fair! he cheated, I had to type my response.. he did a copy / paste.

so unfair.. # pout # ;(

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Troy_Clavell
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to add a bit more. I agree, use the build in windows tool, diskpart. And if this isn't your C: drive then you can't just use diskpart and expand the volume while the VM is online.

However, with that said. If there is a single HDD presented to the guest and it's partitioned within windows, the only way to increase would be to use converter.

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KamilAzmer
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Just want to add and sharing, if you want to expand C:\ drive(system drive), diskpart cannot expand it's but there are another tools that can help and it's was free called as ExtPart.exe ( http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&releaseid=R64398&forma... ). It was easily to use and simple as diskpart. The Extpart can expand the c:\ drive. Already tried and tested.

Thank you

@ -- visit my blog at http://www.azmer.my -- @ virtue your mind @ KamilAzmer
Vitalhostage
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An additional alternative if you've got room enough to install it and your server is a VM, is to put VM Converter onto the server, and run a conversion which allows you to extend any of the drives to whatever your underlying storage is capable of holding.

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