Edwin Hendarsyah’s Corner

If you running out of disk space on your windows 2003 server which running on your virtual machine then what will you do???

Have you ever been in this kind situation before…..???? if you’ve been…welcome to the club……..
I am assuming that you use VMware Server and windows as your guest os right?
Let’s get down into the business……

If you have vmware workstation installled on your computer, please go to the program directory and then execute the following command on windows command line :
C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Workstation>vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -x 1000Gb Nama_Image_Vmware.vmdk
in bahasa means that we asked vdiskmanager to expand hardisk space for our image file to 1000 Gb.
Take a look at the the log message and read carefully what it said.
If every things go exactly like we want then continue to next step.
C:\>cd “Program Files\VMware\VMware Workstation”

C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Workstation>vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -x 950Gb “f:\
Contribute\Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition.vmdk”
Using log file C:\DOCUME~1\Admin\LOCALS~1\Temp\vmware-Admin\vdiskmanager.log
Grow: 100% done.
The old geometry C/H/S of the disk is: 1044/255/63
The new geometry C/H/S of the disk is: 124014/255/63
Disk expansion completed successfully.

WARNING: If the virtual disk is partitioned, you must use a third-party
utility in the virtual machine to expand the size of the
partitions. For more information, see:
http://www.vmware.com/support/kb/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1647

C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Workstation>

Now hat our partition had been enlarge, but windows still see the old partition. So how are we gonna tell windows that he has larger disk space then before. Windows 2003 can not help you with disk management. We need third party tools like backtract or knoopix or ubuntu live cd. We neet Gparted or Qtparted.
Now set your virtual machine to boot from cdrom and turn on the vm server.Wait until you’ll see the xwindows comes up. Find
qtparted. Run the program but don’t forget to run as root. I am using backtrack live cd for doing this kind of thing. Since we want to extend our partition, you must dismount your server image before running qtparted. Otherwise you can’t resize it’s partition while their were on active status. I am using #umount /dev/sda1 (since their recognize mine as sda device)

When qtparted running, you will see your windows partition still using the old partition, now you can edit the partition table and enlarge to the maximum disk space which is 950 Gb and then click apply button. Wait for 2-3 minutes qtparted will write to existing tabel. If everythings fine then you can restart your virtual machine but now start from hardisk rather then cdrom.

You will notice that the first thing Windows 2003 server will do is to do scandisk your partition. It means that windows now see that he has more space then before. You can calm down now coz you are 99% sure.
Wait until it show you welcome screen, enter your username and password. Go to my computer, right click on your c drive and see how much disk space you have right now…….if you sure……. you can now go to sleep…….. thank’s God…

another great experiences…. do you wanna share yours…feel free to write your comment…

great link from uncle google:
http://doknir.blogspot.com/2006/07/expand-resizeenlarge-virtual-disk.html
http://www.seandeasy.com/expanding-a-drive-within-a-vmware-image/