Expanding C: Partition on Win2k3 and Remote GParted

As I mentioned in my last post, the C: partition on the Windows server at work had become completely full. I immediately did some temporary stopgaps to hold her over until I could properly repartition her. Today was that day.

Repartitioning modern Windows (Server 2008+, Vista+) is no problem, as you can do it with the included disk management utility. XP and Server 2003(R2) are different, as the disk management utility isn't nearly as capable. This server is a Windows Server 2003R2, so I had to use a third-party utility. For home users, the EaseUS Partition Manager family is pretty good. For a corporate server, though, it's $160. I wasn't approved for spending that (For good reason, the server is slated for replacement in a year or so, so the money would have been wasted in the long-run), so had to go with free options.

I ended up going with two different tools: one for shrinking the data partition and one for expanding the system partition. I used GParted to shrink the data partition and ExtPart to expand the C: drive. The reason being that Windows doesn't really like GParted and sometimes it'll require a repair action from the Windows disk when messing with the C: partition. I didn't want to deal with that and ExtPart is a small, simple, free utility for extending a partition (hence the name) from within Windows.

The day started at 8:40 am. I fired up CloneZilla and cloned the hard drive. If there was a power outage or some other freak accident during the repartitioning, I could then simply restore the image in a short time. I always recommend imaging your system before repartitioning for this reason. There are lots of disk cloning tools, I like CloneZilla. I tried doing this the day before, but the version of CloneZilla I had didn't work with my server's RAID card (a SAS 6/iR). I brought a freshly burned copy of the latest CloneZilla release and it recognized my drive just fine. This ran until 12:35 pm.

Next it was partitioning time. I inserted the GParted Live CD and got busy. Unfortunately Dell thought it was a good idea to make the data partition an extended partition. This means I'd have to do an extra action: First shrink the data partition and then shrink the extended partition it resides in. This means it'll take more time. I figured it to be done by 2:30 pm originally, but this would make it take longer. I figured it'd be done by 5:30 pm (it ended up beating my expectations by finishing at just shy of 4:50 pm). I didn't want to stay at work until 5:30 pm, time to get remote access to the GParted Live CD.

This actually proved pretty easy. First I configured the network, which GParted Live includes a nice desktop shortcut to do. Next I opened up a terminal. GParted Live is based on Debian so I did a sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get x11vnc... This didn't work. Turns out GParted comments out the repos from sources.list. So I did a sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list and un-commented the repos.

So now to install and run x11vnc:

user@debian:~$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install x11vnc
user@debian:~$ x11vnc -forever -display :0

The installation pulled a few packages besides x11vnc: libvncserver0, libxssl, openssl, tcl, tcl8.5, tk, tk8.5, and x11vnc-data. It only ended up taking 11.2 MB of more space, so no big deal, my server has plenty of RAM.

The forever flag tells x11vnc server to remain running after a client disconnects. Without that, as soon as you disconnect the first time, x11vnc will stop running. I planned on connecting a few times so I could do periodic check-ins on how GParted is progressing. The display :0 flag tells x11vnc to show the current session instead of creating a new one. It would be useless to VNC in to check on GParted's progress if I was given a new session. I also didn't want to risk x11vnc disconnecting and me being SOL, so I also decided to enable ssh on GParted. This is simple.

First, we need to set a password and configure hosts.allow so I can ssh in. This is done with sudo passwd user to create a password for the user 'user'. Without this you'd have to allow for passwordless login for ssh, which would require more configuration. Easier to create a simple password. Next you need to edit hosts.allow by doing nano /etc/hosts.allow. Add sshd subnetblock. (don't for get the period!) to the end. In my case it was sshd 192.168.1. that I needed to add. Now I just restarted networking and started ssh

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart && /etc/init.d/ssh start

End result? I drove home at 3:00 pm and started checking on it. I use LogMeIn to remote into the office and then fired up TightVNC to check on GParted

 And then a bit later I saw:

Success! Done! Well, with the GParted part. I drove to the office to finish it up, since GParted will hang after ejecting the CD, and the server itself hangs on a setup in the preboot environment due to an alert I cannot disable.

Upon Reboot, Windows did a consistency check on the data partition, no biggie. I then rebooted again and was almost done. Now I need to expand the C:\ drive with ExtPart

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator>cd C:\Dell\ExtPart
C:\Dell\ExtPart>extpart c: 15325

That's the default directory ExtPart creates when "installed" (it's a self-extracting archive when you download it). As far as the extpart syntax: it's simple. You specify the drive letter and then the amount you want to expand it in megabytes. In my case, that's c: and 15325. The end result? 26.9 GiB C: partition and 16.4 GiB of free space. I call that a rousing success for an honest day's work.