forcing a dynamically expanding VHD to expand ?

I have a XP VHD that is set to "Dynamically expanding virtual hard disk"
but I keep getting the low disk space warning in it. I'm having to
uninstall things, compress folders and other tricks to keep the thing
from breaking.

How can I make it auto-expand the size rather than coming up against the
size limit and not expanding ?

The size is currently set at 16,384MB. Luckily, when I let the XP
utility that recovers disk space when it gets low, it got me back 2GB so
I'm going to be OK for a while. I do expect to use that up over the next
year though. I want to let it grow rather than have to treat it as a
fixed size drive.

I've seen the virtual disk wizard option to change it to be a fixed
size, and I imagine if I do that then I can make that fixed size bigger,
but I like the idea of it being auto-expanding. It just won't expand.

 

Thanks Mark, yes it does seem like I misunderstood.

I guess I'm forced to convert it to a fixed size and hope that when
doing that, I get to change the size.

 

I guess I'm forced to convert it to a fixed size and hope that when

You wont be able to.

There's a couple different ways to do it, one being to use a tool like
this:
http://vmtoolkit.com/blogs/announcements/archive/2007/01/17/vhd-expander-available.aspx

And then using a partition manager in the VM to expand the partition,
another is to use an imaging program and copy and expand your current
partition onto another VHD that's size was set bigger to begin with.

Make sure and make a backup of your original VHD first though!!

 

There's a easier (but not necessarily quicker) way of doing it using
Acronis's clone-disk feature. When I bought my most recent laptop I
wanted twin 500GB drives in it, but the laptop manufacturer wanted way
too much for it. So I went with the cheapest (single) drive they
offered. When it arrived, I plugged one of the 500GB drives I'd bought,
dropped it into a USB2 case and did a clone disk. It's in the operations
menu. It will happily clone to a larger disk and will adjust partitions
as it does so. I'm so impressed with the clone disk feature that I have
backup 500GB drives and use it to maintain a plug-and-go backup. If this
primary drive dies, I'll be back up and running in 2 minutes

 

Thanks a lot for that. I'm trying it now. I'll probably use partition
magic to resize the primary partition once it's increased.

 

You're welcome. You shouldn't run into any problems.

 

To complete this thread, you're right, I didn't. The resizer took less
than half an hour to resize my 16GB vhd file. Then I just resized the C:
partition in it using partition magic (takes just a few seconds). The
final resulting vhd file is still only 16GB of course, but now it will
expand up to the max size of 28GB that I set it to.

 

Thanks for posting back, it might help someone else in the future!

 

I know its an old post but I find having a 2nd virtual drive does the trick
(and should be a better way of managing server builds anyway) all the OS
stuff is kept on the 16Gb drive and the 2nd drive is where I keep data, just
means I can restore the main 'C' drive without having to recreate/backup the
websites or SQL databases I run on the VM's also the same 2nd drive can be
used across multiple VM's - NOTE only one VM can access a VHD at anyone time..

cheers,
craig