resizing C: boot partition dynamic disk

[acnsys]

Hi,

I did it all wrong. On a VM i did a shutdown and from "edit settings"in the VI client, i resized the C: drive i then rebooted and converted the C: drive to dynamic thinking it would allow me to extend the drive with the disk management mmc. Nope, i tried diskpart who refuses to resize C:, i tried the vmware converter and the converted wont reboot ( the boot partition cannot be found). I tried gparted but it cannot resize dynamic volumes.

Any chance or am i good for a system restore?

[Rubeck]

What about attaching the .vmdk holding the C: partition to another VM... ? Then you can do diskpart...

/Rubeck

[malaysiavm]

If you have the latest VM converter, you can try to reimport the entire VM to another host in your farm. During that process, you can resize the partition from the virtual device as well as from Operating System perspective. Alternatively, you can resize by using the open source tools on Linux base which is gpart, or you can try partition magic if you have the license on that.

Malaysia VMware Communities -

[ilatimer]

You cannot run diskpart extend on a system partition (you can on 2008), so just connect the vmdk to another VM (assign a drive letter like D:) and then run diskpart extend against the drive. Remove the vmdk from the tempory VM and then start the origional VM. The C: drive will be extended.

[mike_laspina]

Hello,

You can mount/assign the vmdk to another Windows VM and convert it to a basic disk.

[acnsys]

I have tried attaching the VM on the 😧 drive of another VM server but diskpart still sees it labeled as a boot/system partition.

[Rubeck]

What Windows version are you using?

/Rubeck

[acnsys]

2003 R2 SP2

[Rubeck · Accepted solution]

Hmm.. Wierd ...

Well.. Gparted is also an option.. See guide: http://searchvmware.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid179_gci1324177,00.html#

/Rubeck

[acnsys]

I know Gparted but it wont work with dynamic disks.

[Rubeck]

Ohh, you're right... I've forgot.... Minor detail

/Rubeck

[Erik_Zandboer]

This would be the time to clone your VM (while it still at least works). I assume you did not make a backup before the upgrade to a dynamic disk?

How to get a boot disk from dynamic back to a basic disk is beyond my knowledge (maybe a Microsoft guru would have an answer on that one).

What you could do, is simply extend the C: partition with the grown part (this is called spanning under microsoft). Not nice, not a best practice, but it will work (and quite well; not much overhead here).

[donlee]

just a +1 on this, using a helper vm to try and extend volume for a C: drive of another VM. I am getting the message from diskpart.exe that the volume may not be extended. listing volume shows the E volume as system and the C volume as boot. if anyone has come up with something that works as of recent I would really like to know. critical VM ran out of disk space and failed attempts to ghost to another disk despite all scans says the partition is healthy. helper vm with diskpart.exe just doesnt work.

thanks,

Don

[maishsk]

What I would suggest is to boot the Helper VM

After it has booted

Add the second hard disk

You will then be able to extend the volume with diskpart

Maish

Virtualization Architect & Systems Administrator

[donlee]

thanks, I finally did find a helper vm that would work, then I found that the disk was no longer bootable. I had to go back to the original VM and mark the partition as active and all was good.

[bdhtran]

Hello

I'm relatively new to VMWare and I would like increase my disk space on my C: drive.

Can you please explain in detail how you did it? I tried following poster steps but could never get it to work

Thanks in advance for your help/time.

Regards

BT

[Jorgen_J]

Convert the dynamic disk to a basic disk. either you do i manually (it aint easy) or you use a program like Paragon Partition Manager Professional Edition.

Regards J

Linux is like a wigwam. It has no Windows or Gates and it got Apache inside.

[donlee]

This was a single C: drive of 10GB (basic disk)

I added a 2nd disk to the VM of 20GB (basic disk)

Booted to ghost boot disk and started clone disk to disk

There were some peculiarities about this particular VM that ghost would not clone the disk as expected.

I had to use the ghost.exe -IA option which does a block copy and does not expand the partition.(this still troubles me but the disk appears to be healthy)

Normally the ghost operation would cover it, and I would need go no further, but now I had an extra 10GB of unallocated space on my disk. Simply running diskpart would not work on the existing VM, since the disk was marked as a system disk on that VM.

I attached the 2nd disk to an old template I had and ran diskpart.exe

Typed select disk 1 (verified it was disk 1)

For some reason on the template VM it was volume 0

So I typed select volume 0

Then I typed 'extend'

Diskpart paused for a few seconds then came back with a 'successful' message

Tried to boot to the new 20GB disk and it would not boot.

Had to re-attach to the template and mark the partition as active using windows disk management tools

Successfully booted.

Now I don’t expect you to have to go through all of what I did. I was not familiar with the vmk command to increase the size of the VMDK file, and normally ghost.exe would have cloned successfully and extended the partition for me, so this was an unusual situation. In any case, the original disk is preserved in the event that something would have went horribly wrong and I needed to fall back to original configuration. Best of luck!

[msemon1]

I saw this issue when I attached the VM to another VM. I think I had to rescan or refresh under disk management for the VM to show up as a non boot/system partition.

Mike

[LilyChen]

This article tells a way to copy dynamic disk and resize it