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Expanding the space on the C driver of a 2008R2 server on ESXi

Is this possible?   I know it is with Zen but when I add space to the vmdk file for the C drive on a windows 2008R2 machine and try to expand it's grayed out.
Avatar of Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
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Yes, it's very possible.

Please note if you have a snapshot or IDE disks, you cannot expand the virtual disk, and it will be grayed out, and you will need to resolve that issue.

Do you have a snapshot - check my EE Article

HOW TO: VMware Snapshots :- Be Patient

Once you have Extended the virtual disk, you will also need to alter the OS partition inside the VM, using Disk Management, and Extend Volume,

see my EE Article

HOW TO:  Resize a VMware (VMDK) Virtual Disk
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ASKER

HI,

I've extended the Volume in VMware, they dives are in  SAN, they're SAS, not IDE.
The 'Disk 0' has no 30GB of unallocated space.
The 'extend volume' is still grayed out.
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
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You need the free space to be right behind C:, and not D: (it must be between C:\ and D:\).

You will need to boot the VM from a 3rd party tool like GParted, then first move D:\ to the end of the disk, and after that you can extend your System Partition using either GParted or Windows Diskmanagement.

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=gparted

But your disk setup isn't the best way to handle things when in a VM. Normally you don't partition a virtual Disk into system and data partitions (or similar. You rather use 1 Virtual Disk for your OS, another for the Data and so on. It makes management much easier. So rather than moving partitions around like I mentioned above, it would make sense to create a new Virtual Disk and copy your Data partition to that. Then delete the data partition and use your complete first Virtual disk just for your OS.