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Extending partitions With GParted

Tuesday, 07 November 2006 by Michel Roth

It is not uncommon that you have to enlarge a partition of a system whether it is physical or virtual. In a Windows environment, the diskpart command can be used but does not work for boot and system partitions. A lot of times however, I have the need to expand the system partition. Here are the steps I follow in an ESX environment but they can also be used in GSX or Workstation (with some other tools) or even old school physical systems.

Step 1: enlarge disk with vmkfstools
Power down the virtual machine and use the service console command vmkfstools with the -X parameter. For example:

vmkfstools -X 12G

Step 2: boot the guest normally
You need to boot the guest normally to let Windows detect the new disk size. If you omit this step, GParted will throw errors after expansion of the partition.

Step 2: use GParted to enlarge the partition on the disk
GParted (Gnome Partition Editor) can be downloaded as a Live CD from here. Just put the iso on your ESX system and connect it to the virtual cd-rom drive of the guest. Then boot the guest and boot from the cd.

Read this entire techtip at the source, Baeke.info.