Dell ExtPart.exe: Extending your C:\ Drive

I’ve been getting quite a few requests to extend the system partition on older Windows 2003 VMs. Over time, all of the Microsoft patches, application data etc, have filled up these drives.

This is not a problem with Windows 2008s native “Extend Volume” function. However, for Windows 2003 boxes, I’ve been using Dell ExtPart to extend these partitions. This process can be done on the fly with no down time. (Although, I typically perform a reboot to confirm it comes back up)

Dell Extpart can be located here: http://www.dell.com/support/drivers/us/en/04/DriverDetails?DriverId=R64398&FileId=2731129714&DriverName=Dell%20Basic%20Disk%20Expansion%2C%20v.1.0.4%2C%20A01

Confirm you have a good backup prior to proceeding!

Steps:
1. Confirm you have enough disk space to accommodate the increase in disk size in your datastore.  Increase the size of the hard drive you wish to extend from the vSphere Client.
2. Copy extpart.exe. to the temp directory. Extract.
3. Confirm that the newly allocated space is available in Disk Management.
4. From the command prompt, run extpart.exe.  Select the volume you wish to extend, and the size you wish to increase it by.  In this example we're extending the drive by 5GB (5x1024 = 5120)

5. Confirm the volume has been extended to the appropriate size.
6. Reboot the server to confirm that it comes back up clean.

That's IT!