I believe I need to extend my current C: drive (~4GB) (primary partition and boot) and was wondering if you could give help out? I currently have 620 MB free.
Ive already moved the pagefile.sys, various logs, Exchange Information stores to E: but am still short of space to install Win2k3 SP2 and Exchange SP2. (Win2k3 requires 369MB + 369MB for uninstall)
My particulars: Im running Hardware: Dell PowerEdge 2850 Software: Windows 2003 Server with Exchange Server 2003 and have six (6) X SCSI Hard Drives with 146GB each.
All are Basic disks. Looking at the Disk Management console I have the following:
Disk 0:
Volume Layout Type Filesystem Status Capacity Free Space Fault Tolerance
<Dell utility?> Partition Basic <blank> Healthy (EISA) 31 MB 31 MB No
(C:) Partition Basic NTFS Healthy (System) 4 GB 620 MB No
Data (E:) Partition Basic NTFS Healthy (PageFile) 146.75GB 143.25GB No
New Volume Partition Basic NTFS Healthy 19.53GB 19.47GB No
To summarize:
Primary Partition: <31MB + (C:) 4GB NTFS > | Logical Drive: <(E:) Data> | Primary: 19.53GB | Unallocated: 649.41GB
After reading numerous posts on this subject, my first inclination is to use Norton Ghost (which we already own) to ghost the partition, delete the partition from the recovery console, write it back from Ghost with a large partition size. Comments on this approach?
Other possibilities I considered, but don't think would work in my situation include:
1. Moving the C:windows/system32 folder to my E: drive (which would free up ~400 MB) or is this just 'kicking the can down the road' until the next SP release?
2. I've looked into buying Acronis (too expensive) or some other 3rd party software (i.e. BootIt NG (
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/),
Ranish, however, these would be more difficult to use since I can only use "approved" software due to government constraints on software).
3. Not sure about mounting an empty NTFS folder into C:?
4. Other?
Notes:
1. I looked at Microsoft's Diskpart.exe utility and am unsure if it will work on Win2k3. From reading other posts as well as Microsoft's (KB: 886986) I've heard conflicting ideas. The old diskpart utility from Win2k may work on Win2k3 but I haven't heard of anyone successfully doing that with something similiar to my setup.
2. Dell also has an expart.exe utility, but again, I haven't heard of anyone successfully extending a boot partition with something resembling my setup.
Thanks.
- Jeremy
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