Server 2003 online C drive Expansion

Today I went retro and expand the C drive of a 2003 server. In the past I have used Gparted for this but there was a requirement for the VM to remain online this time and so I decided to use Dells Extpart tool . The steps I performed were:

Firstly I copied the zip of the ExtPart tool over to the server in question and extracted it to C:dellExtPart . I expanded the size of the VM disk as normal and then RDP’s to it.

I launched command line and changed directory to the location I had extracted the files to, C:dellExtPart.  The format for the command is as follows

Usage: extpart [volume size] volume  – volume to expand. eg. f:, g: etc. (only basic volumes) size    – size in megabytes to expand the volume

So in this case I ran C:dellExtPart>extpart.exe C: 5120

ExtPart – Utility to extend basic disks (Build 1.0.4) (c) Dell Computer Corporation 2003

Current volume size     : 20480 MB (171798691840 bytes) Current partition size  : 20480 MB (171798691840 bytes)

New volume size         : 25600 MB (214748364800bytes)

It completed quickly and then I checked the space was visible in Windows disk management. That was it, job done.

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