I recently needed to resize system partitions on several Windows 2008R2 virtual machines. To do this with Set-HardDisk the virtual machines must be powered off and you need a helper VM. I was looking for a way to do this without downtime, as that can be arranged when executing the steps manually (grow the disk, log into the guest, rescan disks and then extend the partition). I came up with the following workaround and thought it would be worth sharing. The idea is to set the hard disk to the new size with Set-HardDisk and then use Invoke-VMScript to run diskpart from within the VM. I included the -ResizeGuestPartition switch on Set-HardDisk as that appears to complete the task of re-scanning for disks within disk manager.<\/p>\n
\n$guestName=\"newDiskTest\"\n$guestUser=\"Administrator\"\n$guestPass=\"Aw3s0m3pwd\"\n$newSizeGB=40\n \nGet-HardDisk -vm \"newDiskTest\" | \n?{$_.name -eq \"hard disk 1\"} | \nSet-HardDisk -CapacityKB ($newSizeGB*1MB) -ResizeGuestPartition -GuestUser $guestUser -GuestPassword $guestPass -confirm:$false -ErrorAction:SilentlyContinue\n\nInvoke-VMScript -vm $guestName -ScriptText \"echo select vol c > c:\\diskpart.txt && echo extend >> c:\\diskpart.txt && diskpart.exe \/s c:\\diskpart.txt\" -GuestUser $guestUser -GuestPassword $guestPass -ScriptType BAT\n<\/code><\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I recently needed to resize system partitions on several Windows 2008R2 virtual machines. To do this with Set-HardDisk the virtual machines must be powered off and you need a helper VM. I was looking for a way to do this … Continue reading