Ghost, flp, patches and drive space - help!

[Scott-P]

Before when a virtual machine was running low on hard drive space, I would add another virtual drive and boot the VM from a floppy image file in the form of a .vfd file made with winimage and Ghost from one HD to another. This has stopped working giving me an "invalid configuration for device '0'" error when I point the virt floppy drive to the image. I can mount an .flp file but nothing else. Only thing that has changed was installing patches. Soooooo...

1) can I convert the .vfd file to an .flp file? I can't find a utility that will do that.

or....

2) is there a better way to accomplish this (increasing HD space?) Seems like there would be.

[MR-T]

You could use the system-rescue-CD.

http://linux.softpedia.com/get/System/Recovery/System-Rescue-CD-188.shtml

It contains loads of utils for changing disk partitions.

[bister · Accepted solution]

vmkfstools lets you increase the size of the VMDK. Afterwards you need to enlarge the partition to gain all the disk space. Under Windows you can use "diskpart" for doing this.

[mattpound]

Using diskpart works fine on a non boot partition. I've used this method to extend a boot partition under Windows 2003.

http://vmprofessional.com/index.php?content=2k3resize

[Scott-P]

Actually, yours is the proper answer, I think. I marked bister's answer correct before realizing the caveat about this being the being the system drive and diskpart not working on that! I don't see where I can change that - is there? Sorry.

I will look at that link. My only concern regarding this method, as opposed to the Ghost method, is it is destructive and if anything goes wrong it would be a major PITA. I guess I can just back it up and hope for the best....

Thanks for the information.

[Scott-P]

Marked the wrong one as correct - marking this unanswered to see if I can change it.

[Scott-P]

Bah! Thought I could change the marking of the posts as "correct" or "helpful" and all that. I need to spend more time in these forums.

[filopinojack]

Hey, prev. I ran into the same problem with the virtual floppy. You can just change the extension of the floppy image file to .flp and it will work.

In regards to expanding the system partition, I used the method of expanding the .vmdk file, then booting the VM using Knoppix Live Linux CD and using utility to increase C: drive to take up all the new space on the .vmdk

Message was edited by:

filopinojack