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Over time the boot partition on a Windows Server 2003 installation might just turn out to be too small. There can be various reasons for this, but the fact remains that over time you will accumulate data on the boot drive that you didn't take account for when you set it up initially.

Luckily I run almost all of my servers in a VMware based virtualized environment, where it's easy to expand the the virtual disks. The problem is that Windows Server 2003 doesn't let you easily expand the boot volume, at least not without downtime. I've previously talked about using tools like GParted to expand the boot volume but there are easier ways to do it and prevent downtime at the same time!

All you need is love. No,wait, that's something else entirely! All you need is ExtPart. ExtPart is a lovely little 36KB tool that Dell has provided to expand partitions on Dell based servers and storage systems. It is a little known fact that ExtPart can do the job in any 32 bit Windows Server 2000 or 2003 based install (no 64 bit support, sadly), and in Server 2008 there are other methods of doing this.

Enough talk, lets get down to the business at hand.

1. Download ExtPart from the Dell download site
2. Expand your boot volume, either via the Virtual Infrastructure Client or via vmkfstools
3. Run ExtPart inside your VM to expand your boot volume to the new size

Thats it. The following screenshots outline the process very well, without having to guide you through each step. Have a look!

It can't get much simpler that this, honestly.

One of my virtual machines, running on ESX Server 3 (VI3) was in dire need to get it's boot partition expanded. Obviously I had miscalculated the storage requirements for this particular VM, but luckily there is an easy way to expand the VMDK file and then use third party tools to let Windows utilize the new space.

• 1. Shut down the Virtual Machine
• 2. Expanding the VMDK
  Log into the ESX server via ssh (I prefer Putty) Find the .vmdk file you want to expand and use vmkfstools to expand it:
  vmkfstools -X 20g vmname.vmdk That expands the existing virtual disk to 20 Gigabytes, now we need to make the extra space available to Windows.
• 3. Resize boot partition
  As Windows doesn't allow you to resize the active boot partition, you'll need a third party tool to accomplish this step. In this case I used the GParted LiveCD, but you could also use BartPE or other bootable disk partition/resize tools.
  All I did was to download the GParted ISO, copy the .ISO to my datastore, mount it as a Virtual CD-ROM device and boot my VM from it. Then use the tool of choice to expand the existing partition.
• 4. Remove the virtual CD-ROM device and reboot the VM

Thats it. How painful would that have been if this was a physical machine?