Sean Deasy almost saves my bacon
Sean Deasy's post about how to expand a VMWare disk without totally blowing it away almost saved my bacon tonight. I experienced a complete meltdown of my demo SharePoint Virtual Machine this weekend which set me back pretty badly. I've been rebuilding the thing for quite some time when I realized (too late of course) that I forgot to change the default size of the dynamic disk file to be larger than 8 GB. Now, Windows Server 2003, SQL Server, SharePoint, Outlook, etc. The image was full and I'd not even installed Visual Studio yet. Visual Studio says requires 1.1 Gb on the C: drive even if you tell it to install to another drive (assuming you let it install the default options, this goes down as you remove things like J#). I'd created a second drive in the VM to handle file installations (too late for SQL Server and Office 2007 doesn't appear to let you pick the install path) and this ended up holding over 2Gb worth of install files. However, there was still too much on my C: drive and I needed to get more free space on the drive so I wouldn't have to start over. According to most of the sites I found on the web, you can't do this for the system or boot partition. However, this is where Sean's post came in - a combo of VMWare tools and Linux to do the job.
According to Sean, you can use a combination of the vmware virtual disk manager command line tool and Knoppix Linux to enlarge the boot partition. Then your drive is bigger. This is wonderful, except that it didn't work for me. I went through all the steps and the W2k3 disk manager tool said I had a 12 Gb C: drive, but Windows Explorer was still only reporting 8 Gb.
I solved my problem a different way - I moved my 1.1 Gb swap file from the C: drive to the E: drive. Now I've got plenty of space!