Resizing NTFS partitions impossible

gpartedntfsvmware-serverwindows-server-2003

yesterday night I converted a physical server into a virtual one. I used the vCenter Converter from VMware for this task. After converting and deploying the server as a virtual machine I enlarged the virtual hard disk. This was one of the main reasons for the virtualization. After resizing the virtual hard disk, I wanted to assign the newly gained disk space to the existent partitions. So I started the VM with GParted Live and wanted to assign the free space to the other partitions. But, for some reasons, GParted wasn’t able to enlarge the partitions. Shrinking would have worked, but enlarging didn’t.

After this I tried a commercial tool. This one seemed to be able to resolve this task. But what can I try before buying the commercial tool? What am I doing wrong? It’s not the first time I enlarged partitions using GParted, it always worked fine. Except this time.

I’m on VMware Server 2.0.1 (I know, 2.0.2 is out, will update as soon as possible) running on Debian 5.0 on a DELL PowerEdge. The guest OS is Windows Server 2003 Standard 32-Bit.

Any suggestions appreciated.

Best Answer

If you're attempting to make an NTFS partition bigger after increasing the disk size, this can be done inside Windows itself live. No need to power off or use third party tools. The steps are detailed in KB325590, but here they are:

  1. Open a command-line, or the Run dialog
  2. Launch "diskpart"
  3. Type 'list volume' to get a list of the volumes on your system (there may only be one). Note the volume you wish to extend.
  4. Type 'select volume 2', where 2 is the number of the volume you identified in the previous step.
  5. Type 'extend' to make the NTFS partition fill the rest of the space on the volume.
    1. Alternately, 'extend size=2048' would extend the NTFS partition 2GB.

This should work on Server 2003 (for non-system partitions) and Server 2008 onwards (for all partitions, system or not).

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