Extra virtual disk space not usable in Windows

[TheVMinator]

I've resized a virtual machines virtual disk by editing the properties and then used a live CD partitioning tool to resize the partition.  Inside windows disk manager it shows the extra hard disk space as though the Windows partition size has been increased successfully.  However, when I look at the properties of the hard drive in Windows, the extra size does NOT show and it is not usable or accessible to the file system.  Any ideas what went wrong and how to fix?

Thanks

[bulletprooffool]

Get hold of a copy of EXTPart form Dell and use this to allocate the space in the OS.

If the drive you have extended is not the System drive (C:\) you could just use Diskpart at the command line - >  (Select the drive and use the Extend command)

[Troy_Clavell]

can you provide a screenshot of disk manager?  There is not un-allocated space.  The HDD  you increased, is  single disk and does not have any partitions setup on it?

Have you tried a reboot as well?

[TheVMinator]

Yes it is a single hard drive.  Here is a screenshot.  I did try reboot - that didn't help.

[bulletprooffool · Accepted solution]

I've had exactly this strange view before and couldn't explain it. Seemed rather odd that the OS appeared to show the disk space as allocted, yet the additional space was not available (even when checking by WMI query etc)

In the end though, EXTPart did remedy the problem for me. (and quickly)

If you don't want to use EXTPart, you could use converter to recreate the disk.

[TheVMinator]

When I ran extpart I specified  the C: drive and it says "unable to connect to C: or it does not exist".  I booted into safe mode and reran it.  This time it says

Current Volume Size 40954 MB

Current Partition Size 61439 MB

Unable to expand partition. Check if there is sufficient space on the disk

So out of curiosity I opened diskpart.exe and diskpart reports that there is one volume with one partition of 60GB.

Any more ideas?

[a_p_]

I saw this a few times. It seems the partitioning tool for which reason ever didn't finish the whole job and did not configure the partition table correctly. Easiest fix: Extend the virtual disk by e.g. 1 GB and resize the partition again. That worked for me.

André

[TheVMinator]

Thanks all.  What ended up working was using VMware converter to convert back to the smaller size, then use VMware converter to convert back to the larger size again.  After that, the OS was able to use the entire virtual hard disk.  Appreciate all of your input.