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jso2765Flag for United States of America

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I have a VM running VSphere Hypervisor. It has a 20 GB capacity but is only partitioned for 16GB. I have 4 GB unallocated space. I am running low on available space and need to reclaim the 4GB.

I have a VM running VSphere Hypervisor. It has a 20 GB capacity but is only partitioned for 16GB. I have 4 GB unallocated space. I am running low on available space and need to reclaim the 4GB. I am down to an available disk space that will not allow me to install a 3rd party partition manager. Is there a way in Hypervisor ESXi to do this? The OS is Server 2003.
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IanTh
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yes if the drive is scsi instead of ide you can just go the the settings of the vmm and you can respecify the hdd size it doesn't work if its set to ide though
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I'm in Hypervisor and looking at the setting for this VM. It is SCSI and the provisioned size is 20GB.. But this includes the 16GB currently allocated plus the 4GB unallocated. I'm looking for a way to extend the 16GB into the unallocated space. I'm not seeing in the application where that is possible.
Not sure from your original post, but if the unallocated is visible in windows then you can obtain access to the unallocated part of the disk using diskpart

open a command shell, type diskpart

list volume should show you available volumes, assuming your C:\ drive is volume 1 do
select volume 1 you should then be able to simply extend this to fill the drive using
extend

That "should" work assuming windows can see the unallocated part of the disk happily.

HTH

MadAsToast
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Danny McDaniel
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Are you saying I can use the Windows Diskpart command on a VM? I have 4GB unallocated space adjacent to the c: drive. If this is possible, the command Line would simply be:

extend size=1024?
no in viclient go to the vm setting and in there select to hdd and you can set the siza in there
I think there's some confusion here...

There are two parts to increasing a drive in windows:
1 - increase the size of the .vmdk with the vSphere client
2 - increase/stretch/extend the partition(s) so that the OS can realize the extra space provided by step 1

If I understand jso2765 correctly, he has already increased the size of the .vmdk but now needs to stretch/extend the C: drive partition/volume.

You have to do step 1 before you can try step 2 unless you already had unused space within the drive.

There are a variety of ways to accomplish step 2 but Windows won't allow you to extend the system drive while the computer is running, so you need to find an offline method to do it.

To answer the last question, yes your command (extend size=1024) should work if you only want to extend the partition by 1 GB.  If you want to extend into all available space, just use the single command 'extend' by itself.
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ASKER

I also had to designate a drive letter for the extended volume. Diskpart will see it but the extend command will not work otherwise.
hmmm... I saw that happen once (maybe twice) where windows didn't automatically assign a drive letter and I had to go assign it one.  I'll add a warning to watch for that in future posts.  :)

Thanks!

-Danny