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I'm currently trying to find a method to extend the system partition for Windows 2003 Server. I've been trying to use GParted, however I keep running into the issue below.

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Is there something that I need to do in order to extend the C: drive using GParted?

Also, I'm unsure of if there are other free third party tools aside from GParted that would allow me to accomplish the same task on a windows 2003 server. If anyone has any recommendations of other tools that could accomplish this task I'd greatly appreciate it.

EDIT: Looks like GParted does not work with dynamic disks. I don't think it would be worth the risk of trying to go from a dynamic disk to a basic disk so instead I will look for other third party tools that can accomplish extending system partition with dynamic disks. I'm currently looking at AOMEI partition magic tool, however I'm not sure if this is a tool that would work for dynamic disks yet. If anyone has ever used the tool or knows anything about it, please let me know.

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    Sounds like it needs be a Basic disk, instead of Dynamic. Check if your disk is dynamic, and change if possible. Make sure you have a good backup first. technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc776315(v=ws.10).aspx
    – DanBig
    Sep 23, 2013 at 15:46
  • 1. It's not possible to go from a Dynamic disk to a Basic disk without data loss. If you're going to change the disk from Dynamic to Basic you need to make sure you have a backup of your data. 2. Is this a virtual machine?
    – joeqwerty
    Sep 23, 2013 at 16:37
  • @joeqwerty yes (for some reason someone removed that tag) we're talking about virtual machines.
    – Valrok
    Sep 23, 2013 at 16:45
  • I removed the tag bc nowhere was it stated that this was a VM.
    – DanBig
    Sep 23, 2013 at 17:00
  • Ok, here's what you can try. I've done this may times with Basic disks and assume it can be done with a Dynamic disk as well. Make sure you backup/copy the virtual disk first. 1. Shut down the VM. 2. Attach the virtual disk to another VM. Extend the volume from within this second VM. 3. Detach the virtual disk from this second VM. Start the original VM and verify that it boots correctly and that the volume is now the new, extended size. If there are any issues then revert to your backed up/copied virtual disk.
    – joeqwerty
    Sep 23, 2013 at 17:48

1 Answer 1

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@DanBig is right. You have to convert to basic the disk which could be risky so make a good copy of the virtual disk before any movement.

There is an unofficial way that could work: - creating a new virtual disk and make it BASIC disk wth size you want from within the virtual machine.

  • booting a Winpe eviroment ISO (Hirens) with some imaging software(ghost, acronis) from within the virtual machine

  • clone the dynamic old partition to the new basic vpartition.

  • Make it bootable with any partition manager (partition wizzard or acronis partition manager)

  • disconnect the old partition before boot.

And (From the social technet) another way (sounds a little bit risky):

"...for the brave amongst us the support engineer did suggest the Dskprobe.exe tool to manually convert it back to a basic disk. We had already considered this option and will probably research it further, but he was very clear to point out that MS do not support the procedure in any way shape or form. It is also worth mentioning he tested the Dskprobe procedure on 3 machines (virtuals) and was succesfull in 2 of the 3 attempts. He went on to say that the machine that did fail (BSOD on boot) may have been having other issues other than the Diskprobe procedure based on the bugcheck code generated by the failure.

MS link to dskprobe --> http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc736327(WS.10).aspx"

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