Resize a windows 2003 systemdrive lun

[itacticam]

Hi Guys,

We have a few luns that need to be grown by 10GB however they are system drives.

Normally in vmware I would grow the disk en use a gparted-live cd to grow the partition inside the drive.

However has any of you guys done anyhing like this before?

Greetings,

Hans

[robpreston]

Hi there...

One quick question, can you get an outage on the VM ?

Rob

[itacticam]

Hi Rob,

My problem is that the machine isn't a VM.

We have a Egenera Bladeframe where the lun is connected througt fibermapping.

We are going to create new machines for the ones where the c: drive is now 98% full because there isn't really any other solution.

Greetings,

Hans

[robpreston]

Sorry Hans, I mis-read your message.

That is a difficult one.

What about this:

1. clone the LUN
2. resize the new LUN
3. mount the new LUN on the machine as a second drive
4. extend it to the size you want using diskpart
5. replace the mapping of the original LUN with this new cloned/larger LUN.

might work.

[marre]

Heya,

As we mostly use RDMs with vmware I do this all the time. This should apply to a physical server as well.

1: Shutdown the server.

2: Take a snapshot of the volume contaning the LUN.

3: Resize the LUN to the desired size.

4: Boot the server on the gparted cd and expand the partition. Do not extend the drive to fill maximum space, if you do that you can have dodgy problems with windows detecting the new size but the filesystem will still be thew old size. Just leave a GB or so as free space just to be sure. ( http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php )

5: Boot normally on windows and enjoy the free space.

6. If something goes wrong just restore the LUN from snapshot.

Good luck!

[__schaefers_12762]

...or, just use ExtPart: http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&releaseid=R64398&formatcnt=2&fileid=83929

It actually works on boot partitions

Best,

Bernd