Comments on: Expanding a drive within a VMWare image

By: webbsolution

webbsolution — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 16:38:05 +0000

Neat solution however I have a new challenge related to this method.

I have resized the disk. In computer management it reads as the correct size with 3.9 gb free. Great.

In my computer it reads as 3.99 gb main disk (it was 4 GB before) with 130mb free, cant run scan disk (not enough space), can’t install anything …ran chkdsk from the command prompt and then shut it down and ran it from safe mode….rebooted a few times.

There is no unaloocated space int he drive in the computer management GUI

Windows is freaking out…
Any ideas?

By: Rick

Rick — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 20:26:32 +0000

The reason why Explorer does not see the changes is because when you are in Knoppix, prior to commiting the changes (spanning the disk), you have to first unmount the drive, then click commit on QTParted. Then, all changes are written back to the drive, or else, the changes are never commited back to the drive entirely.

If you are having an issue like this… boot back into Knoppix, make sure the drive is not mounted by typing “mount” (will show you all currently mounted drives), then go to QTParted and select the drive, QTParted will automatically mount it when you select it, click back to File->Commit, it will give you a warning. Do not click “Yes” yet, pull up a command prompt and type “umount /dev/drive_name_here” and it will unmount it. Then click Yes and voila!… Done.

By: Micah Peterson

Micah Peterson — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:00:35 +0000

You are the man, thanks a ton, you saved me a wack of time!

By: David Bernal

David Bernal — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 06:59:09 +0000

Thanks for all your posts.
This helped tremendously. Saved tons of work.
I had to fix my ntfs partition before windows 2003 would see the new size.
Thanks again!

By: netadmin

netadmin — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 15:13:57 +0000

Another way to do this is to use VMware converter. It is free software from VMware. It will let you take a Virtual Machine and do whatever you like with the disks.

By: Myra

Myra — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 07:21:09 +0000

Thanks Srini !

By: Darius

Darius — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 16:18:52 +0000

Thank you Sir! this solution was exactly what I needed. Thanks a lot!

By: Srini

Srini — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 07:46:17 +0000

Thanks a lot Sean for the great article.

I followed Method 2 with Knoppix on Windows Server 2008 (Experimental) and it worked perfect. Although it failed first time when I tried to extend 100% of the newly created disk space. The second time I substracted 0.97 MB (seems like it was used for some administrative purpose) from the total size and it worked.

By: mital

mital — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:11:23 +0000

Best article ever!! I went with Method 2 and the Knoppix v5.1.1 of 2007-01-04 ( http://mirror.netcologne.de/knoppix/knoppix-cd/ )…..worked like a charm.
Thanks a lot.

By: Viren

Viren — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:52:40 +0000

Thanks a lot Sean. Saved me a lot of time and efforts. Great details.