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Our C: drive on some of our Windows servers is only 8GB, is there anyway to dynamically update this? Its all locally attached storage.

Thanks

John

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You need a partition resize tool. Examples include PartitionMagic, or the excellent gparted. The latter is a linux boot disc: boot, resize, sorted! Its also free, just remember to make a full backup just in case something goes wrong.

edit: as mentioned, Dynamic disks are a different matter for most resizing tools. If you want to resize a dynamic volume, you use the diskpart utility provided by Microsoft. This comes with Win2003. Please note that you cannot resize a dynamic volume if it was originally on a basic disk and was later upgraded to dynamic. Back everything up regardless before starting.

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  • gParted is the best.
    – IOTAMAN
    Jul 9, 2009 at 12:25
  • Is this easy enough to do with Raid configurations?
    – John
    Jul 9, 2009 at 13:21
  • Yes, it will work with RAID configurations, assuming it is hardware RAID. It might be possible with software RAID, but it would probably be much harder to perform than with hardware RAID.
    – phuzion
    Jul 9, 2009 at 13:55
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    I am mostly a Windows guy, but have found gparted to be easy and reliable. I have used it on some of our W2000 servers where the OS partition is tiny.
    – cop1152
    Jul 9, 2009 at 15:28
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    yep, things can go wrong. In such a case I'd create a brand new partition and restore from the backup I made before resizing. If you're a l33t hax0r, you could follow these steps: fugitivethought.com/blog.php?action=view&blog_id=77 Impressive knowledge that chap has!
    – gbjbaanb
    Jul 10, 2009 at 15:41
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There are a number of products which can do this. One Open Source solution is Gparted, which is a bootable Linux based application which can perform non-destructive re-partitioning. Always take a backup before such operations, just to be safe.

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If your disk is bigger than 8Gb you can use software like Partition Magic, or Acronis to extend the partition. However if your physical disk is only 8Gb, then your going to need to look at getting a new disk and using something like Acronis to image the old drive and move it to the new one.

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You're going to run into some issues if you are trying to resize a dynamic disk. There are some tools out there that will allow you to convert the dynamic disk to a basic disk to resize it, but I'd be pretty leery of trying it. take a look here: http://www.partition-tool.com/easeus-partition-manager/copy-dynamic-volume.htm

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I recently used Acronis Disk Director Suite for that, works like a charm.

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Windows 2000 introduce a new feature called dynamic disk. It allows, amongst other things, to dynamically resize a partition. You can even extend your partition on another disk.

This article provides some usefull informations.

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  • One thing to bear in mind is that many disk recovery tools will not work with dynamic disks.
    – John Gardeniers
    Jul 9, 2009 at 21:35

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