Resizing partitions on W2003 Server

[mstanton]

Hi,
I have an old Windows 2003 Server, Standard Edition, SP2. One of the disks has 3 partitions: a small boot partition, C:\ which is 16 GB in size and E:\ which is 21 GB in size with tons of free space. The C:\ drive only has 1.27 GBs of free space, and I need to increase it. I have never resized a partition before, and have done some research on it. Many people suggest buying partitioning software like Easeus or Paragon, but I read that there is a way to do it using Diskpart.exe from a command prompt. Has anyone done this successfully? This is my second week at my job, and I don't want to do anything that could screw things up. Any advice/opinions/suggestions will be greatly appreciated!!

TIA

 

[dberg35]

Resizing on a server running a RAID isn't highly recommend as issues can occur. First is look at what is using up that drive like the pagefile this can be moved to the other drive. Download treesize free as this will tell you the size of each folder.

 

[mstanton]

Thanks, dberg35

 

[Roadki11]

I have used ghost to do this many times, even on DC's with hardware raid arrays. Never had an issue. Slave an IDE drive in and ghost to image on the IDE drive, then ghost it back, you can resize the partitions on the fly. Normally I replaced the smaller raid disks with bigger disks between ghosting.

RoadKi11

"This apparent fear reaction is typical, rather than try to solve technical problems technically, policy solutions are often chosen." - Fred Cohen

 

[dberg35]

Roadki11 is correct but I have never been a fan of doing this. I have seen it work fine and also blowup.

 

[Madrox]

I've never had this work well even with products that specialize in it like the old Partition Magic. If its a RAID setup I wouldn't try it personally as in my experience you have to break the "container" to change its size and that means destroying it. I've never tried the Ghost method so I couldn't speak to that..

What is this server being used for and why do you "need" more room on the c: ?

If you need more space do you have an extra drive bay or could you put a good quality external HDD (USB?) on it and go that route?

 

[mstanton]

Oops! My original post was incorrect. The server crashed about 2 weeks ago, and we were able to restore it, but it only restored to SP1. It had SP2 previously, and we need the additional space on the C: drive to reinstall SP2.

 

[technome]

As to resizing partition with third party software, I used Acronis, Easeus and Paragon on at least 35 raids to modify partitions, never an issue. Sometimes it may take time (approx 30 minutes to 1.5 hours). I would recommend you run chkdsk /f before you do it. One rather scary repartition, Acronis appeared to freeze, but after giving it a half hour, it was not the case.


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