expanding windows c drive for windows 2003 – the easy way :-)

I’m using this tool for years now but I notice that there are still people who don’t know of it’s existence and how easy it is šŸ™‚ Note: only needed for windows 2003 1) download extpart.exe from the website :Ā http://www.dell.com/support/drivers/us/en/19/DriverDetails/DriverFileFormats?c=us&s=dhs&cs=19&l=en&DriverId=R64398 2) put it somewhere on your network 3) expand your disk config in virtual center with e.g. 2G 4) log on to the VM, start command prompt and go the location where you’ve put the extpart.exe 5) extpart c: 2000 Ā  ready šŸ™‚

3 Comments

  1. This can be done live without down time in server 2003.
    This also works with server 2008, but 90% of the time you have to boot to safe mode to do this. Its either an R2 vs Standard or SP level difference. I’ve tried to stop the VMware tools service to see if that is causing the problem, but it plainly requires safe mode in most cases to extend server 2008 c:.

    • Indeed without downtime on 2003.
      But on 2008 it is not longer needed. Just start disk management in Computer management and choose rescan disks. After that choose : extend disk and ready…

  2. If you are going to use this on a production environment, make sure to run a chkdsk /r at the next reboot. Extpart can cause filesystem errors that are not destructive, but get worse over time. Chkdsk has always repaired these errors without incident for me.

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