Extend C: drive of Vmware GSX guest

Just like a real machine you could download gparted on a bootable CD (its like partition magic but free) and resize the partition.

You can download a cd from here:
http://gparted-livecd.tuxfamily.org/

Of course you don't even have to burn the CD, you just mount it as a virtual CD and boot the guest from it.

Ah ya, as almilyo says, if you don't want to take away from that 20gb partition but want to add more space then you have to do that in vmware first, then expand the partition.  Depending on the type of disk (basic, dynamic, etc) you could do it either right in windows, or from the gparted boot cd.

Thanks guys, would it be more straightforward if I took from the D: and gave to c:?

Sorry, quick note for arrkerr1024 - using gparted won't affect the data on the existing partitions (although I will take a backup first)?

Thanks again for the great help.

In my experience, it's not possible or recommended to extend a Windows boot volume virtually.  I see some good suggestions here for extending NON Windows boot volumes, but Microsoft says you can't do it.

If you do have success in this - please post your exact steps and prove me wrong! :)  

gparted will (should) not affect the data on either one of your drives, it will just resize the partitions.  I've used it, with good luck, on windows machines with normal partitions and NTFS file systems.  But I'd sure take a backup first (which is easy with VMWare :-)).

If you really didn't want to mess with your production machine you could copy the vmware machine over to your laptop and to a test re-size there (if you have vmware workstation - you could always download an evaluation if you don't or run server).

The easily (and safest) solution to this is to attached another virtual hard drive (what ever new size you want) and then use a tool like Ghost (or any partitioning or disk copying tool) to do a disk to disk copy.

For me this is a fairly simple process as I have a BartPE ISO and extending a 10GB OS drive takes only a few minutes.

This is the safest solution since you never touch the original drive/data.

I am not sure, but maybe gparted can do a partition copy, which would also work. You might have to fix the MBR to boot though.

Once your partitiion/disk is copied to the new drive, you remove the old drive from the VM config. I hope that helps.

Thanks everyone...I managed to get this done! :)

I used vmware-vdiskmanager to extend the disk to 40 GB. Then added that disk to another VMware guest and used diskpart to extend the partition. Then remove from that guest and start the original and, hey presto!, the C: drive has been extended!

Once again, thanks to everyone...