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Increasing the size of a disk partition
Symptoms
You need to increase the size of a disk partition.
You have increased the size of a virtual disk but can see no increase in available space in virtual machine.
The partition does not increase with the increase in disk size.
You cannot see new disk space.
Expanding a virtual disk does not work.
Purpose
Extending a virtual disk only extends a virtual machine's disk, not any third-party partitions within it. For more information on how to extend the virtual disk, see the documentation for your VMware product.
This article describes increasing the size of a disk partition. The virtual disk may have unallocated space that you now want to use. You may also have increased the size of a virtual machine's virtual disk but are unable to see the new space from the virtual machine's operating system.
Resolution
Use a third-party utility to resize disk partitions.
Note: Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 can expand the volumes from the Disk Manager in Computer Management. Right-click on volume and click Extend Volume. For more information, see Microsoft's documentation.
If you encounter a situation where you add more storage to an existing VM's disk volume, and DISKPART allows you to (apparently) successfully extend the volume, and yet from Windows Explorer, the disk still shows the original size, check to ensure that the volume you are trying to extend does not contain the page file. For more information, see the restrictions on volume extending in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article 325590, specifically:
"You cannot extend the partition if the system page file is located on the partition. Move the page file to a partition that you do not want to extend."
If you are using the Windows DiskPart utility, it can only extend (expand) data volumes. If you use the DiskPart utility to extend a system or boot volume, you may get an error. For more information about extending partitions with the DiskPart utility, see the Microsoft Knowledge Base article 325590.
Notes:
VMware does not endorse or recommend any particular third party utility, nor is the above list meant to be exhaustive.
The preceding links were valid as of June 19, 2009. If you find the links to be broken, provide feedback on the article and a VMware employee will update the article as necessary.
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Additional Information
VMware command line utilities used to resize virtual disks do not touch the data or partitions inside the virtual disks. Any desired partition changes must be made from the virtual machine's operating system.
