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Can I increase the size of the harddisk of a Virtual machine running on ESX host vmware 4.0

Hi,

I have machine with 40GB of the c drive, is there a way to extend the size of the hard disk of the VM. I am looking for the option to increase the size of the c drive on the hard disk.

Did shutdown the virtual machine and from edit settings have increased the provisioned size of the hard disk but it reated a seperate partition on the VM. Is there a way to extend the existing drive in a VM.

--Thanks

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Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

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Danny McDaniel

if it's windows, you can shutdown the VM, attach the disk to a helper VM that's running windows, open command prompt and run diskpart, 'list volume' then 'select volume #' for the correct one, then enter 'extend'. that should extend the partition, exit diskpart, remove the disk from the helper vm and bootup the vm you just extended.

Paul Solovyovsky

what is the operating system?

noxcho

hanccocka gave exact steps. Follow them.

RFD110

The only problem with what Hanccocka said is that the ability to increase the drive size in ESX is only when the disk is a SCSI virtual disk. If it was created as an IDE virtual disk ESX doesn't let you increase the size of the drive in vSphere. This is the drive settings for the VM and has no bearing on the physical drives.

A ran into this issue several times with WinXP VMs because their default is to have a IDE drive. It is possible to change the drive to SCSI from IDE, but it is a bit complicated.

The other issue is if there are multiple partitions on the virtual drive, you have to move the other partitions down.

Otherwise his instructions are spot on, and I have done the several thing many times.