Extending System Partition

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Guest

Hi All,

I am having a problem with my Windows 200 Server system and boot
partition. The bottleneck is I am running out of space in the C: Drive. The
dive is dynamic and is mirrored also. I have Exchange Server and active
directory running on the same server. I have only 500MB space left on the C
partition but have 80 GB of unallocated space on the disk. Is there any way I
can extend the C drive ? The drive was converted to dynamic disk from a basic
disk.

Thanks in advance for any help or comments.

Regards,
Abraham
 
Abraham typed this:
Hi All,

I am having a problem with my Windows 200 Server system and boot
partition. The bottleneck is I am running out of space in the C: Drive. The
dive is dynamic and is mirrored also. I have Exchange Server and active
directory running on the same server. I have only 500MB space left on the C
partition but have 80 GB of unallocated space on the disk. Is there any way I
can extend the C drive ? The drive was converted to dynamic disk from a basic
disk.
Click to expand...
Thanks in advance for any help or comments.
Regards,
Abraham
Click to expand...


Abraham,
I will be 'increasing' the C drive on my Win2K3 Srv to 72GBs using
Acronis MigrateEasy 7.0 - it is supported in most of the Windows server
systems and allows for a COPY or ClONE (not changing SIDs, etc) of the
boot drive. I 'have not' tried this yet, but for $40 it sure seems like
an inexpensive and time considerate way of getting a larger boot drive.
Perhaps it would fit your needs?

Doc
 
Doc typed this:
Abraham typed this:


Abraham,
I will be 'increasing' the C drive on my Win2K3 Srv to 72GBs using
Acronis MigrateEasy 7.0 - it is supported in most of the Windows server
systems and allows for a COPY or ClONE (not changing SIDs, etc) of the
boot drive. I 'have not' tried this yet, but for $40 it sure seems like
an inexpensive and time considerate way of getting a larger boot drive.
Perhaps it would fit your needs?

Doc
Click to expand...

Follow up - I have not found Acronis to 'be all it was stated to be' - I
am believing it is NOT going to work and so far have NOTHING from TECH
support on why Migrate Easy says I have UNSUPPORTED hard drives (basic
unraided scsi drives, not using raid controller - just dynamics)...
Acronis is supposed to be dynamic capable. NOT...
 
If you need to expand the os partition of dynamic disk, it is a bit inconvenient, as there is no SW that can reisze dynamic disk directly, you need to copy the dynamic volume to a basic disk and then resize, after that remain basic disk to use or convert back to dynamic in disk management.
BTW, there is an article very useful, you may check http://www.partition-tool.com/resource/server-2003-repartition-dynamic-disk.htm
 
Extend System partition without data loss

There is no way to resize the system dynamic disk directly but the basic disk. So if you want to resize the dynamic disk, you have to convert the dynamic disk to basic and then resize it.

However, if you convert a basic disk to dynamic, you cannot convert it back to basic without data loss, as you need to delete all dynamic volume firstly before converting.

The software RAID is always at a high risk of data loss, so the best and safest way to resize dynamic is to clone the dynamic disk to backup and them resize it.

There is a free tool for you to clone the dynamic disk:



After you have backed up all the data on the dynamic disk, you may follow
 
Doc said:
Abraham typed this:

Abraham,
I will be 'increasing' the C drive on my Win2K3 Srv to 72GBs using
Acronis MigrateEasy 7.0 - it is supported in most of the Windows server
systems and allows for a COPY or ClONE (not changing SIDs, etc) of the
boot drive. I 'have not' tried this yet, but for $40 it sure seems like
an inexpensive and time considerate way of getting a larger boot drive.
Perhaps it would fit your needs?

Doc
Click to expand...
Acronis MigrateEasy is used to copy disk, so it is not a great tool to extend the partition size, in fact, acronis disk director is the right tool, but it is $609 too expensive in my opinion. There are also many other cheaper sw, paragon, easeus partition master. Gparted, diskpart is free tool.
see this repartition server guide, it may help the users solve this problem easily.
 
Now, In Vista, 2008 and Windows 7, extending volume is no longer a difficult task, 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. About how to extend system volume in Vista,2008,Win7, here is an instruction: http://www.extend-partition.com/extend-system-boot-partition.html, it seems Windows 7 is indeed better than WinXP/2000.
 
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