Problem with Windows 2008 Hot Extends

[jbsengineer]

Has anyone seen issues with Windows 2008 and hot extends? The VMware Disk Extend is always successful. However it seems inside the 2008 VM the filesystem on the disk I try to extend corrupts if the 2008 server has been up and running for a week or so with activity. I can fix it by running chkdsk /f and letting the machine reboot and chkdsk will delete a "corrupt attribute record 128". We are seeing this across our entire 2008 File Server environment (26 file servers). If we reboot the server before the hot extend inside windows everything is happy.

I can replicate the issue with IOMETER. If I run a 2008 machine with 1 worker process for 5 days the hot extend will be unsuccessful, if I reboot right before the extend successful.

Just want to see if anyone else is seeing this, I'm not finding much out on the net. Before I start a long dreadful process with Microsoft maybe there is a hidden hotfix somewhere?

[shurik]

I had an issue extending partition where extend via disk manager showed some incomprehencible error and while partition was extended volume was not still showing old size. I did not try chkdsk /f but read only chkdsk showed no problems. I shutdown windows and extended disk in control center a little bit more while vm was off, then started wimdoes and immediately extended partition with command line diskpart rather than disk manager GUI it fixed the issue. The other win 2008 computer I extended did not have this issue but I extended it on cold VM and extended partition right after start where the problematic one has been extended a week after dis has been resized

[AndreTheGiant]

The hot extend in Vista/Windows 2008 is quite a new feature

Somebody suggest to do "small" extend (max 10-20% each time), just to minimizing NTFS corruption issues.

Andre

[jbsengineer]

Microsoft released a "semi" fix for the issue you described. We've had to use it several times:

With Windows 2003 they released the above hotfix. Which just included a new function in diskpart called "extend filesystem". This was to overcome the problem with the NTFS driver exhausting its resources when it tries to hot extend. It appears the same utility "extend filesystem" is in 2008 and we have used it from time to time. However if the FS corrupts on the extend you have no choice but to reboot.

[jbsengineer]

Hot extend was available in 2003. We have tried small increments or large. If the machine has been running for awhile it will have issues. Reboot and it extends perfectly fine, everytime.