Saturday, December 04, 2010

Windows Home Server on Hyper-V – Resizing the Partition

Yes I know that Windows Home Server has Drive Extender. Yes I know that Drive Extender makes adding storage space easy and is a brilliant piece of technology. However I wanted my WHS install to have a resilient System disk and besides, I didn’t have a spare box for WHS. So I put it on my server running Hyper-V, but clearly didn’t give it enough disk space.

So here’s the process for adding more disk space to a virtualised WHS install:

  • Shut down the WHS virtual machine
  • Use the Edit Disk action to increase the capacity of the VHD file used by the WHS virtual machine
  • Start up the WHS virtual machine
  • Log in to the desktop on the WHS virtual machine
  • Run Command Prompt
  • Run diskpart
    • select disk 0
    • list partition
    • select partition 2 (assumes that you’re using one VHD file and you want to extend the single data partition to fill the unused disk space)
    • extend
    • exit

Yes I know you’re not supposed to do this. Yes I know you’re supposed to add additional disks (by adding another VHD file). But this works fine for me. YMMV, so take a backup first!

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