Resize C drive in Win2008 VM

[rogermccarrick]

ESXi 3.0

I've done this before in 2008 VMs and it worked.

Go to VM settings, resize the C drive from 20GB to 30GB.

Go into the OS, look at Disk Management and you can see the 10GB unallocated.

In Diskpart, list volume, select volume and extend.

This usually works.

But in this one it shows the C drive as 30GB in Disk management, this is good, but 20GB in Windows Explorer, this is not good.

I've rebooted, defrag, tried Diskpart extend again and it says already extended.

I use WMI vbs scripts to get info on disk size and disk usage, and that says 20GB also.

I also ran a checkdisk at startup, no change.

Anyone ever see this before?

[AntonVZhbankov]

Have you tried Dell ExtPart? Free utility, 36 kB size.

---

VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[rogermccarrick]

I'm not sure what I can d with Extpart.

In Disk management it shows the whole 30GB allocated to the C drive.

So there is no unallocated space for extpart to work on.

I could say "extpart c: 10240" but I suspect I'll get an error. It's a production machine so I don't wanna try now.

I tried it on my local PC and got this expected error.

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

[AntonVZhbankov]

Very strange problem.

Can you please provide some screenshots?

---

VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[gunnarwb]

For $500 you can get acronis and never deal with a diskpart problem again.

[rogermccarrick]

Yes .. here are the screen shots of explorer, disk management and the VM settings

[gunnarwb]

What does your Datastore say the size of the VMDK is? (Screenshot)

[rogermccarrick]

Says 20GB , 21,012,740 kb

[gunnarwb]

Pretty sure that is your problem. You are running an older version of ESX which doesn't automatically resize that file. The file needs to be resized to 30GB.

[gunnarwb]

Check out this article it might help, I'm trying to find a better one but I think this article should be good enough.

http://knmi.wordpress.com/2008/03/20/best-practices-of-resizing-windows-virtual-machine-disks-on-vmw...

[BenConrad]

No sure why it's not working. Have you tried the GParted bootable ISO?

Ben

[rogermccarrick]

Ok folks here's how I fixed it.

VMWare tools are installed on the server.

I went into computer management, right clicked on disk 0 which is the C drive and selected Shrink.

It says it can shrink it by 800mb to 2800 and something in size.

I hit ok and it took a few nervous minutes.

Finally it left me with a 19.18 GB C drive and a 10.82 unallocated block.

I went into diskpart, list volume, select volume 1, extend and low and behold my C drive is now 30GB both in DM and Windows explorer.

I had shut the machine down first and cloned it. Discovered this on the clone and then quickly did it on the production machine, so sorry I have no screen shots.

Thnaks.

[Texiwill]

Hello,

Moved to Virtual Machine and Guest OS forum.

Best way is to use VMware Converter to resize the disk + partitions.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky VMware Communities User Moderator, VMware vExpert 2009, Virtualization Practice Analyst[/url]
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