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Hands on leader, developer, architect specializing in the design and delivery of distributed systems in lean, agile environments with an emphasis in continuous improvement across people, process and technology. Speaker and published author with 18 years' experience leading the delivery of large and/or complex, high-impact distributed solutions in Retail, Intelligent Transportation, and Gaming & Hospitality.

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Resizing Virtual PC VHD Disks

I hit a wall with a VPC Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) where apparently it had expanded as far as it was going to. I am not sure why a Dynamic disk would not continue to expand dynamically, but it hit 20 GB and that was it.

So, there were several options that were proposed, including ghosting the old VHD to a new VHD, as well as just adding a new "data" VHD.

In the end, the one I liked best came from my good friend Todd Sussman.

It was quick, painless and worked like a charm...

  1. Backup (copy) your VHD file
  2. Download and install VHDResize (google it). Run it on the host, point to the VHD and select the appropriate size (i.e. 30 GB)
  3. It will take a while, but once complete, re-mount the VHD to your VMC and boot into the Guest hosting the resized VHD.
  4. Install a parition management tool such as Partition Magic or Partition Manager, which will detect the available space that is unallocated and allow you to extend it.

That's it.

If anyone would like to educate me on the difference between "Dynamic" and "Fixed" disks in Virtual PC 2007, or have an even simpler suggestion than the one above, please feel free to comment.

 

 

Print | posted on Monday, March 03, 2008 9:06 PM | Filed Under [ Misc. ]

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# re: Resizing Virtual PC VHD Disks

For the free route on reallocating space on the partition (step #4), you can use a "live" bootable ISO of Knoppix or Ubunutu and use GParted (included with both) to reallocate the partition.
10/17/2008 2:47 PM | David Barrett
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# re: Resizing Virtual PC VHD Disks

Rick,
Here's the difference between the "Dynamic" and "Fixed" disks in Virtual PC 2007. Fixed disks have the disk size preset, so that's self-explanatory - if you choose 60GB that's how much you'll get. Also the size of the .vhd file representing that virtual hard disk will be 60GB. Now, with the dynamic disks, when your setting the size, you're actually setting the highest possible disk size. That means, if you set your dynamic hard disk size to 60GB and just install, say, Windows XP, it will take around 6GB of occupied space and your disk size will be around, say 15GB (so, not 60GB). As you add data and files to that disk, the size will grow obviously, but, it won't grow indefinitely - it will stop at 60GB as you have set in the first place. Also, the .vhd file will not take whole 60GB at first. It will "dynamically" expand as necessary. Thus, you can regard disk size setting for virtual disks as a "top margin".

I hope i was clear enough. Take care.
1/29/2009 6:40 AM | Boris
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# re: Resizing Virtual PC VHD Disks

fixed: it immediately allocates the space
dynamic: grows until maximum disk size
5/24/2009 12:49 PM | that guy
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