Resize C drive (W2K8)

[shane_presley]

I have two scenarios where I need to resize the C drive of a Windows 2008 R2 VM.  I know this question has been asked a lot, and I have searched/read lots of posts.  But I want to confirm my understanding.

Scenario #1) W2K8 R2, single vmdk, single C drive.  (although it does contain that 100MB system reserved partition).  basic disk.

Scenario #2) W2K8 R2, single vmdk, contains a C and D drive.  basic disk. 

I know in previous versions (windows 2003), you could shut it down, resize the vmdk, attach it to another windows VM, then increase the C (now called something else) drive using diskpart.  But I thought in Windows 2008 you could do that on the fly.  But that doesn't seem to work. 

I also know the vm converter should work (in both scenarios), but I was hoping to avoid that.

Thanks

[weinstein5]

What error do you get? You should be able to size a windows 2008 disk - see this http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771473.aspx

[ThompsG]

Hi Shane,

Scenario #1 will work fine and can be done inside the OS with no downtime.

Scenario #2 will not work. You cannot expand the C drive because the D drive is on the same VMDK. You will need to remove the D drive (backing up the data first) then you can extend the C drive. Maybe a good time to create a second VMDK for the VM and move the data on D to it depending on the size of the current one.

Occasionally you will need to initiate a "Rescan Disks" from Disk Management to see the additional space but I'm assuming this was already tried.

Kind regards.