INTRO
Hello friends, has this ever happened to you, you spill red wine on your white couch and don’t know what to do?
Kidding aside, surely you’ve run into this issue before? You note the C drive on your windows VM is running low, extend the disk on your hypervisor, on opening diskmgmt.msc, you see the following:
As a result, you cannot extend your C drive to include the extra space you added in the previous step. This is due to VM’s obeying the rules of “contiguous blocks” that regular physical drives do. DANG
Ten seconds later on Google, you find something like THIS I’ve used similar methods in the past, but it’s a long / manual process with room for error with commands you’ve probably not used since Windows XP. Facing the same issue on 3 of my home lab VMs today, I decided to try out a tool that I found a few years back for re-formatting SSDS to install windows, where I had previously installed ESXi. It’s called GPARTED it’s free / fast / ez to use
PROCESS TO EXTEND C DRIVE VIA GPARTED
- Download a recent gparted live linux ISO from https://gparted.org/livecd.php
- Upload gparted ISO to your datastore
- Attach to your VM, set your VM to boot to the EFI “list of boot choices menu”
- Boot to ISO attached in step 3
- Launch the tool answer defaults for any questions, unless you don’t want to run the GUI in English
- Next, move your unallocated space BEFORE the 500 MB EFI recovery partition
- below is a screenshot of the BEFORE state, as you can see, we’ve got 52 GB of space that’s AFTER the RECOVER PARTITION
- You should then see 52 GB (or whatever amount you chose) unallocated after your C drive, and BEFORE the stupid recovery partition that you’d probably never use anyway 😆
- Right click on your primary partition you want to expand, and use the slider within GPARTED to select all the free space you saw in step 9
- Commit the changes
- EXIT the tool
- Reboot the VM
- Logon to the VM, open diskmgmt.msc to confirm the changes worked
- go about your biznuzz
GetVpro 