Extend system partition

[Jordy]

It appears nothing will expand a system volume... I have a RAID 5 set and the C drive for some reason grew.. I thought I had lots of room.. Anyway.. Any suggestion on how to expand this ? Can I put in another drive and somehow clone it ?, then restore on a larger
C drive ?

[Michael @ BLITZ]

I'd try looking for software that will let you resize Win2k3 NTFS partitions. Partition Magic might do it. Since you're on hardware RAID 5 it might pose some problems though.

[Steven]

Make a backup before doing anything. <now if it blows up it's not my fault. If you want to "resize" your system partition you'll need a tool 'like' Partition Magic (unfortunately PM will NOT work with a server OS). Try bootitng , or do a google search for a "non destructive repartitioning" tool. I'm not certain if resizing the system partition will affect Active Directory or not (my boss seems to think it will be adversely affected but cannot say exactly why). Your use of a hardware RAID card may be a blessing as this will present your array as a single drive to 'most' bootable applications. Depending on your RAID5 card's capability you may be able to do on-the-fly capacity expansion, but you'll just end up with unpartitioned space in the end. You can also try using folder redirection (mount a folder on another partition as your "Program Files" for example) You seem to need a tool that can non-destructively resize an NTFS partition (2003 uses NTFS version 5.1 I think). If your using a "dynamic" disk configuration you are screwed (seems that after 6 years no one bothered to make a tool to work with this...note to self: do not ever use dynamic disks when possible), you'll need to do it the long way (wipe and load). If your backup software permits "bare metal" restorations (restore to hardware with no OS installed), that's your best bet.

(This may not actually be possible) I've NOT done this with a DC (hosting Active Directory), but if you have the time to experiment, try this: -clone your array to another disk using ghost2003 or newer (as in clone your ### GB raid5 array to a ### GB disk)
-wipe your array partitions -use ghost to restore the data, but enlarge the partition on the target/destination partition (then restore your other partitions as space permits) -test EVERYTHING

[Matt Williamson]

I'm running extremely low on the system partition of one of my 2k3 servers. The physical disk is 18 gigs with 4 gigs allocated to the C: drive and 13 allocated to the D: drive. I had some SQL database files on the D: drive as well as a swap file. I've created a new D: drive using SAN space and moved everything from the previous D: drive to it. I then converted the C: drive to a Dynamic disk and deleted the first D: so it's now unallocated space. When I try to extend the C: using the unallocated space, I get the following message:

---------------------------
Extend Volume
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The selected volume is a system or boot disk or was created on a basic disk in an earlier version of Windows and cannot be extended.
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OK
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Is there any way to get around that using Disk Manager or are there any partitioning utilities that will allow me to do this under Win2k3?

TIA

Matt

[Matt Williamson]

I think I figured out what I can do. I'm going to boot into safe mode and try to the extend option using Diskpart. If that doesn't work, I'll get a copy of Bootitng and resize it with that. I'm still open to other options though so feel free to offer any suggestions.

[Jabez Gan [MVP]]

I don't think this will work. If you use the command line Diskpart in recovery console (or create a MS-DOS disk), you will also stand a chance of screwing up the partition table. I would suggest that you don't waste your time but go straight to Bootitng (or Partition Magic)

[Steve]

With dynamic disks your probably SOL. Bootitng is a great tool but I'm not sure if it supports dynamic disks (almost nothing does it seems). You may have to do a full backup, wipe, re-partition and restore (just make sure all the partitions have the correct letters before restoring your system state, etc). This will take many hours of course.

[runner7@fastmail.fm]

Sorry if this post shows up more than once. I have been having trouble posting it. I want to ask the following:
If you do the above, are you sure that there are no settings that need to be changed for the system to function properly when the O/S, applications, and data suddenly find themselves on different sized partitions? Can you point out where this may be documented? Thanks.

[markr999]

What I did was create a second virtual server and mounted the original as a second disk to the new virtual. Tried to extend but that still didn't work (the d-drive was now listed as system and the c-drive as boot in Disk Management MMC), but then I moved the boot.ini, autoexec.bat, config.sys, io.sys, msdod.sys, ntdetect.com and ntldr (basically all the files in the root) to a folder on the new virtuals hard drive and restarted the new virtual. Then Diskpart allowed me to extend (D-drive wasn't listed as a system partition anymore). Once extended, I moved those few system files back to the d-drive and shut down the new virtual, restarted the old one and voila!

[longtail]

haw-haw, first time see such a strange method. admire markr999

[nitincreasy]

hiii i have 320 gb hard drive but in vista there is only 3 partition makes what i want to do help me....

[longtail]

what do you mean nitincreasy? Is there partition lost? check in Disk Management

[memrary]

At present, In Vista, 2008 and Windows 7, it's possible to extend system partition by using Windows Disk management, which has inbuilt the features of extending volume and shrinking volume, and easy to use. But in Win2000/XP/2003 doesn't support these new features.

[deview]

Hi memrary, but have not a contiguous unallocated disk space after the system partition, this will not use windows disk management to extend volume.