resized disk size not recognized by windows

[khenry567]

Hey folks,

I resized a disk yesterday using known good resizing technique and gpart'd and have a strange problem. ESX 3.5 U3, vm is W2K3. When I open Disk Manager I see up at the top, C: 75g, 330mb free and down at the bottom where the visualization of the hard disk is, Healthy System 220gb. Gpart'd shows me ONE 200gib partition, /dev/sda1. The problem is that Windows does not recognize in the properties that the C: drive is now 200 gig. This is probably going to be a problem in that we can not tell how much space is left on the drive unless we use a third party utility.

Has anyone run into this? and have you been able to solve?

Attached is pic that explains my problem better.

[Jonathan_Storey]

Silly question, but has the VM been rebooted since the disk expansion? Also, if you fire up cmd prompt and try a dsik part to look at the volumes, does it enumerate correctly?

Jonathan

[khenry567]

Thanks for the reply Johnathan,

been rebooted multiple times for various reasons related to this problem.

yes, diskpart show Disk 0, 200g

[JaySMX]

Is the c: drive formatted with NTFS? Run Diskpart and see what the volume size is reported as. From within diskpart, try

list volume

select volume # (where # is the number of the C: volume)

extend

That will extend the drive to the full available space, if Diskpart is able. Also, you are attempting to extend a boot\system volume, this type of volume may be blocked from being extended.

In that case, you can use a boot disk such as ERD Commander or any WinPE type disk which includes the Diskpart utility and extend it from outside the OS.

[Jonathan_Storey]

You can also power off the virtual machine, attach the virtual disk in question to another vm, boot that vm, startup diskpart, perform the expansion for the attached disk on that machine, powered the vm down again, detach disk and fire up the original machine & should be expanded no probs.

Jonathan

[khenry567]

Hey Jay, thanks for the reply.

If you look at the attached pic on my original post you can see that the drive is NTFS and that it is saying that it is a healthy 200g, so I am assuming that there is no more space to "extend" too. Diskpart also lists the disk as 200gb NTFS.

any other ideas please?

[khenry567]

Hey JaySMX,

Didn't read, at first, all of your original reply. The technique I used worked like a champ on the first boot/system drive I tried it on 2 weeks ago.

[Jonathan_Storey]

Hi again,

do you have the opportunity to attach the disk to another VM? Does this behaviour occur when attached to another VM?

Jonathan

[khenry567]

Thanks to all who replied to my problem. I did solve it, but not by fixing the vm with the already extended drive. As much as I would have liked to have fixed the problem vm I couldn't take the time. So, I took the original machine that I had cloned and used Converter on it. That worked and the C: drive on the new clone/conversion shows the correct amount of free space and the correct drive size in all the appropriate spots.