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I need to expand the C drive of a virtual Windows 2003 SP2 server, vmware 5.5

I have a virtual Windows 2003 server. If you look at in in VMware the drives are 400GB and 409GB respectively, but my C drive was configured with only 12GB. I see a D drive with 124.54GB and 263.37GB of Unallocated space. The C drive continues to hit 95% and I have to do a disk clean up regularly. It would be so nice if I could just grab 10 or 20 of the unallocated GBs and expand the C drive. I have not extended a drive on Windows 2003 in years though and want to be very careful. Is it even possible if it is the same drive as the OS? I recall using a DISKPART command years ago in a situation similar to this. Is that one of my options. I attached a screenshot of the current drive configuration
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ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

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

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Peter Hutchison

I would create a new VMDK disk and move the contents of D: drive to the new drive (turn off any services using D: drive first). Then change the drive letter from the old disk to the new disk. Then you can remove the old D: drive volume and thus allow you to expand C: drive to fill the drive. Restart any services.

Thor2923

ASKER

can you recommend a third party software to allow me to rearrange my partitions? I think that is the way I will need to go

Seth Simmons

create a new virtual disk (or create a new partition after D in the unallocated space), change your page file to the new drive, then delete D

then you can expand C using extpart since you can't use diskpart to extend the system partition in windows 2003

using a 3rd party utility will likely cause an interruption anyway since your page file is there

David Johnson, CD

gparted or AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard

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

Software recommended is listed in my EE Article, otherwise download https://gparted.org/livecd.php

But you've got a lot of work ahead of you....

and make sure you have a FULL BACKUP before you start with mangling your partitions!