Monday, December 30, 2013

Expand Boot Volume (C:) of Windows 2003 Virtual Machine

Like a lot of SysAdmins, the environment I manage isn't always up to date with the latest and greatest operating systems or patches for a variety of, usually, business related reasons. This inevitably causes problems as you try to keep everything running while still being old.

I had the wonderful opportunity of dealing with a variety of Windows 2003 servers that are running out of disk space. Unfortunately, previous caretakers of these boxes P2V'd them without doing any resizing of the boot partition. C: is running out of space fast. It just so happens, that's a major problem with 2003 - resizing the boot partition is nearly a no-go without shutting down the whole system and using GParted. Sometimes that kind of server downtime just isn't acceptable for the business.

Luckily, Dell (of all sources) has an online and free solution. Let's walk through the full process. For this tutorial, I will be showing it with VMware. Hyper-V is nearly identical.