Davidb, you are a saviour!

Great! Allow entry of new disk size from keyboard. Slide is rough - up/down arrow too slow

thank you - this helped me out alot.

after resizing the vhd, the size of the new vhd still remains the same. can anyone tell why??

Still tells me the old size

My W2K3 Server environment is also reporting the same size HD after resizing.

right click on my computer and go to manage, then disk management. The extra space will appear as unformatted raw space. Depending on your drive setup you may be able to resize in in Disk Management, otherwise you need to use something like partition magic to resize your original partition to use the new space

Thats what I looked for! Great job...

If you have to use Partition Magic after resizing to a smaller VHD, why not use Partition Magic in the first place and not use VHDResize?

I ran VhdResize and now when I try to start up the VM is says "A disk read error occurred Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart". Any clue what happened?

Too bad you didn't make it to reduce in size. I know, this is difficult... but not impossible ;-)

is there something for VMWare ESX disks?

Cal: resizing ESX disks is built into ESX with the "vmkfstools" program.

hello i have a 127gb dynamic vhd and i try to shrink it to 20 GB fix vhd. it seems that the expand/shrink command do not work when i try to shrink it.( it stays gray) only when i set the size larger then 127, the command gets ungray. please help

NOTE: When doing a fixed resize, ensure that you have enough space on your hard drive for the new image. Otherwise, VHDResizer will complete successfully and you will end up with a 0 byte image file.

thanks again. very great tools. thanks vmware,thanks developer.

great tool - that´s what most vm-users were looking for! Thanks a lot!

Tools is okay because there is nothing else free out there. However, instead of tacking the extra space on as an extra partiion, why can't I increase the size of an existing partiion.

Cool tool, seems to be working great, thanks!!

VHDResizer - I get a "disk read error" when I try to use the VHD as a boot volume (before and after running DiskPart). Any solution to this? The VHD seems to work fine as a second hard drive.

The tool it very limite! I does not allow me to resize below the current size of the vhd. At this point the tool become useless to me.

For Windows Server 2005 this is the cheapest solution to increasing the size of a virutal boot disk. However, to avoid spending $300 for the "Server" version of a partition management utility you can use diskpart. Just attach the bigger C drive as a second volume of a different VM, run diskpart, select the volume, type extend. It quickly uses the full size of the new drive.

Thankyou very much for a useful utility

kudos to this tool for resizing my 'too small' virtual drive. And biggest KUDOS to chrash - that trick about using diskpart did the job for me. Now if I can get all that hair I pulled out glued back in place.....

I does not work. I get "A disk read error occurred Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart" error when starting with my resized vhd.

Problem. An error ocurs. "disk read error", same of ravrav.

Ran the utility against a 4GB vhd, expanding it to 32 GB, then tried to run the virtual PC, but got the same error as the two individuals above: "A disk error occurred. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart." I did a Compact on the file hoping it would fix it, but it did not. Any ideas on what is happening? I am running Virtual PC 2007 on Vista Ultimate and the vhd is of Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard.

A brilliant program! One has to use The disk management tool in Computer management to format and partition the new disk.

How to resize (grow) a VHD based Boot Volume 1. Shutdown VHD. 2. Run VHDResizer and grow to needed size. 3. Mount as a drive using VS2005 vhdmount. 4. Run Windows 2003 diskpart. 5. In diskpart console, run commands "list disk", then "Select Disk #", then "Detail Disk", then "Select Volume #",and finally "Extend". 6. unmount using "vhdmount /u all". 7. Rename file if needed and replace old VHD. (Note: Process not original, from a collection of sources)

Great tool! Thanks a lot.

Doesnt work here. MS Virtual PC 6.0.156 on Vista (32 bit), XP on the virtual machine. Same disk error as above, XP cannot even boot.

Mine won't resize any larger than 4Mb (that's right... Mb, not Gb).

This awesome! Save my neck!

Have a look at this site: http://kb.dutchalps.com/microsoftvirtualpc.htm

Thank you, this saved me a lot of time Now I understand dynamic is not so dynamic Ydns, your the man.

Such a useful util, I won't even complain about requiring signing up to your web site.

Fantastic, this works like a charm.

Using Virtual PC running Windows 2003 server running on XP. The article quoted by Torolf is pure gold. Only extra item I had there was that I had to add a drive letter to the drive before diskpart would recognise that it was dealing with a NTFS partition. Otherwise it works well.

Thanks, I hope that you can do better!

Thanks a lot. It's a great tool :)

Great tool for expanding my VPCs. Following the steps on Pieter's site http://kb.dutchalps.com/microsoftvirtualpc.htm and you can't go wrong. Great effort on both parts!!! MANY THANKS!!!

This might be quite stupid but if you do not notice it straight away you could be reading a few post befor you relize it. While on the last step of using diskpart i recieved the following message. "the volume you have selected may not be extended". I googled it and found a hot fix for server 2003 but it still didn't work. Until i notised that there was no drive letter assigned, strange but true. After assigning a letter it worked fine and all is well.

Great tool. Many many thanks. It is a shame that Microsoft does not come out with such kind of simple but effective tools.

I downloaded the http://www.xtralogic.com/products_vhd_utility.shtml utility. The trial version allows you to expand the vhd by 1 gig. That is all I needed for what I'm trying to do. I ran their utility and then started the virtual pc. I got the same disk read error on boot up. I looked at xtralogic's support page and at the bottom it explained why I was getting this error and how to resolve it. http://www.xtralogic.com/support.shtml#faq_vhdu_disk_read_error I downloaded the TestDisk utitlity and then followed the steps outlined here http://www.xtralogic.com/testdisk_rebuild_bootsector.shtml. This worked!! I'm guessing that the TestDisk utitility will work for those of you that used vhd resizer. When I get time I will try expanding a vhd with vhd resizer and then use the TestDisk utitility to fix it. One other thing is that I followed the following steps http://kb.dutchalps.com/microsoftvirtualpc.htm after running the TestDisk utility. Hopefully this will help others out there that are experiencing this same problem.

Problem. An error ocurs. "disk read error" but able to solve by following the instructions here http://www.xtralogic.com/testdisk_rebuild_bootsector.shtml

Nice job! Thanks for this tool.

great tool. why ms doesnt include it, i cant comprehend.

Thanx noyesar! I was having the "disk error" issue, but TestDisk did the trick, yay!

This is great tool and time saver - resize and then mount with other win 2003 use diskpart to extend.

Excellent tool Thanks a million!

Yes...very good tool. Congrats

resized file doesn't work. system shows Alt+Ctrl+Del I wondering is it not compatible to Virtual PC 2007 SP1 ?? sad...

thanks you very much for this

No prob with Windows Server 2008. Yo can resize the partition with the disk management tool.

Thanks man this is a cooooool tool and saved me,, i have tried it on Virtual PC 2007 running on Windows Server 2008 host and all guests are Win2K8 enterprise... the size will be the same but the disk needed to be extended late from the disk management

Simple but lifesaving tool. Makes it more practical to use performance advantage of having fixed size VHDs

This worked well, but I need to follow the instructions in the comments: 1. Extend partition using diskpart (thanks ydns) 2. Rebuild boot sector (thanks noyesar): http://www.xtralogic.com/testdisk_rebuild_bootsector.shtml

This worked perfectly, the only thing is you need to go into Server Management / Storage / Disk Manager and expand the C volume to include the new space.

Fantastic tool, easy, fast and useful. Thanks man!!!

Worked fine for vhds hosting w2k8, Thanks.

Excellent tool, it saved a lot of my time, Thanks 'ydns' for your diskpart commands as well, Cheers, Jomit

Great tool and great comments as well. As it is been said before: the comment from Torolf Gulstuen is pure gold. Have a look at the website there and has everything you need. thanks a lot to all of you.

how do i get this program to run i have downlaod it and nothin occurs ( video digital singnature)

Worked great - exactly as documented. Thank you very much.

Hi, How can I incrase the size of the linked HDDs? Any ways to do that?

Works great (with a little help from TestDisk), thanks.

is installation really needed ?

I have built a Windows Server 2008 VPC and I wanted to resize it from 16 GB. I tried the VHDResizer and got a new VHD and used the Diskpart as mentioned in one of the comments above. But I am not able to boot the VPC from new VHD. I get this error "selected entry could not be loaded because the application is missing or corrupt" . Looked around on the net but couldn't find a solution to it. Tried TestDisk . It says that everything is ok. But I see some guys mentioned above that they got this to work with Windows 2008. I wonder where I am going wrong?

I had a similar issue as brigittas mentions above .. But my virtual PC was vista on a XP host .. Anyway, i used the vista bootable DVD to repair the installation. At the start itself, it gave a message something like "there seems to be some problem with the startup .. do you want to correct it?" .. i said .. it did a reboot and i did not allow it to boot from the DVD, but let it use the new extended HDD .. and it worked !!

Re: Torolf Gulstuen said: Have a look at this site: http://kb.dutchalps.com/microsoftvirtualpc.htm Thanks to both of you! I followed the tutorial, and doubled the size of my 4Gb disk to 8Gb and was back, up and running, in approx 10 minutes! *Big smile!*

Defect found immediately. Tool stats that the minimum size for a Vista VHD is 15 GB. The current file is only 7 GB. When I select the size to 15 to won't enable the "resize" button. I have to set the value greater than 15.

Virtual PC 2007 will convert between "Fixed" and "Dynamic" and a "dynamic" drive will automatically increase in size as needed. Since this tool does not allow a file to be "shrank" I have to ask what is the point of this tool? I'm not trying to be a jerk, I'm just wondering did I miss something.

Server 2008 on an XP host. I used the tool to increase size, then used the instructions at http://kb.dutchalps.com/microsoftvirtualpc.htm (which is actually what led me to this site in the first place), and my VM was unable to startup due to files not found at boot-time. So I tried the advice at http://www.xtralogic.com/testdisk_rebuild_bootsector.shtml and was told that the boot sectors were identical. I then saw here someone mentioned the the native disk management tool can extend the partition after resizing. So I started from scratch, resized the VD, made it the only disk for my VM, restarted my VM and it came up no problem. I went to the disk management tool and extended the partition and I'm up and running. Not sure why my case was different, but fwiw thought I would share.

After trying EVERYTHING stated above, I got a missing winload.exe error on boot up using my resized vhd for Windows 2008 virtual. I tried everything including testdisk. In my case, I used bcdedit to fix the problem. Steps to fix are here: https://www.hensongroup.com/blogs/archive/2009/08/13/Windows_2008_Virtual_PC_and_Vhd_Resizer_and_winload_exe_error.aspx

Great!!! Thank you very much.

Use the free DiskPart utility from Microsoft to resize the partition after resizing the Virtual Hard Disk. DiskPart is available here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0fd9788a-5d64-4f57-949f-ef62de7ab1ae&displaylang=en

I can't seem to get this to work on a 2003 R2 x64 OS. Seems VHDresizer is 32-bit only.

Why won't the "resize" button turn on after setting the source and destination vhd files?

I have been resizing my VHDs with Portlock Leap Frog -- no problems yet, and it's free :)

When disk capacity is changed and crosses one the following boundaries - 528Mb, 1Gb, 2Gb, 4Gb, change in the disk geometry may cause the NTFS boot sector to become invalid. More detailed explanation can be found here. Fortunately, it can be rebuilt using the Testdisk utility. http://www.xtralogic.com/testdisk_rebuild_bootsector.shtml A disk read error occurred. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart.

Tried to shrink my 18GB VHD (containing a W2K8 Server). After successfully shrinking via diskpart to 8GB I applied VHDResize and found that result minimally is preset to a forced 32GB. Is that a joke? After successfully applying this utility the actual size was the same as before approx 18GB. Somehow confusing, isn't it?

That's simply awesome!!! Thanks very much, David.

When I "extend" it's giving me this message: "The Volume you have selected may not be extended Please Select Another Volume and try again" Any Idea how to fix this ??

INSTRUCTIONS (that worked for me!) 1.) Stop the VM you want to resize. 2.) Create a new folder and name it Backup 3.) Copy the VHD file you want to resize to the 'Backup' folder so you have a backup. 4.) Launch VHD Resizer and use the 'open' button to browse to the VHD file you want to resize. 5.) In the VHD Destination box type a path and a new filename for the NEW (note that word, NEW) VHD file you are going to create. 6.) Type a new (larger) size for the VHD file you are about to create. 7.) Click on the 'resize' button. The application goes to work making a copy of your VHD file but creating a new file with extra disc space on it. 8.) Once it's finished, rename your original VDH file with a .old extension. 9.) Now rename the newly created VHD file to the name of your original VHD file. 10.) Launch Virtual Server and start the virtual machine you have just resized which will be recognised as the 'old' VM file. 11.) When it boots, go to Disk Management console in MMC and you will see new space. 12.) HERE'S THE CATCH! You will need 3rd party disc management software like Acronis\Partition Magic if you want to merge the new space into any other drives, otherwise, you will have fresh drive space that you can format and give a drive letter to. These steps worked for me on 2003 server (both as host and VM), but I can't guarantee it's going to work for everyone!