D'Arcy from Winnipeg
Musings of a Canadian Developer - Silverlight, ASP.NET, BizTalk, Life, and Technology

All I Want Is To Resize My VHD...

Monday, April 28, 2008 10:56 PM

So I tried to build a VPC to mess around with Biz Talk with, but I made one crucial error:

(Windows Server 2003 + Extra Windows Components + Visual Studio 2005 + SQL Server 2005 + Biz Talk 2006 R2 + .NET Framework 2.0 + .NET Framework 3.0) = just under 10 GB

Unfortunately, I WAY underestimated the amount of space and set my VHD size to...you guessed it...10 GB.

No worries, I'm sure there's a way to magically resize my...oh...there isn't? I CAN'T resize it? Hmm...

But then I found VHD Resizer. This is a tool that will supposedly resize VHD's. Wonderful, sounds like what I need!

Unfortunately I'm not sure if the tool actually worked. See, I can't just use this new VHD as my *new* hard drive off the bat. Even though the physical drive may be larger, the partition isn't. So it still reads as a 10 GB drive.

I found some blog posts that walk you through how to get around this, but it involves assigning your larger disk to the secondary drive slot of your VPC. No problem right? Well, problem: for whatever reason, and I triple checked my settings, my second hard drive never shows up!

At this point, I'm thinking that I'm just going to have to start over (it wasn't that much time, but it is annoying as hell), unless someone out there can shed some light on this?

D


Feedback

# re: All I Want Is To Resize My VHD...

D,

Ran into the same issue. Take a look at this.

http://stevepietrek.com/2007/08/07/expand-vhd-file/ 4/29/2008 7:06 AM | Steve Pietrek

# re: All I Want Is To Resize My VHD...


Uninstall Biz and SQL Server, create a second VHD and install them there. Problem solved.

4/29/2008 9:07 AM | William

# re: All I Want Is To Resize My VHD...

I can't help you with the resizing. But if you do start over I'd recommend you just use dynamically expanding VHD's...much more convenient. 4/29/2008 10:39 AM | Dylan Smith

# re: All I Want Is To Resize My VHD...

Well, it is a dynamically expanding VHD...but what's happening is that I'm trying to install a necessary service pack for SQL Server, but it checks the available space before hand (which is sitting at 1GB) and won't go through with it because of a lack of space...it doesn't *know* that the disk will expand when required to.

D 4/29/2008 10:41 AM | D'Arcy from Winnipeg

# re: All I Want Is To Resize My VHD...

Your problem is precisely what you found out: it doesn't expand the partition size to fill the VHD. Try looking at Gparted to expand the partition.

Geoff 7/1/2009 5:50 PM | Geoffrey J Gowey

# re: All I Want Is To Resize My VHD...

You can use any partition manager program to resize the partition inside the VPC. Several are available for free, but this one worked well for me:
http://download.cnet.com/Easeus-Partition-Master-Home-Edition/3000-2248_4-10863346.html 11/5/2009 2:47 PM | street

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