Resizing Windows Partition

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USMCGrunt

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One of the networks my company is in charge of has a server with the partitions as shown in the image above. The problem they are having is that the C: drive keeps filling up...not sure who the hell set up the partitions but I AM aware it's jacked. Additionally, this is a DC who's SYSVOL is stored on the E: partition...and that's it....ya... SOOOooo, there are two ways I can think of fixing this, one is half-assed, the other is what needs to be done but will take the server down for some number of hours (Government entity, would like to keep this to a minimum).

1st method (the half-assed way), take that unallocated space and mount it as a folder that is taking up lots of space on the C: drive. Unfortunately, the three primary space consumers are the admin user account (ya...), a service user account, and Windows. The user accounts each only account for 1-2GB, not a whole lot of space to begin with and, as far as I know, there's no way to MOVE windows while it's running to be able to assign the unallocated space to an empty directory.

2nd method, more appropriate, is to resize the other partitions to the minimum size that data in them allows, get a solid backup (They use Backup Exec), offline the server and blast away the existing partitions, and then use Backup Exec to do a full recovery which will allow me to resize the partitions however I please, as long as they're the same size or larger than the volume being recovered.

Question I have....is there another method that I'm overlooking that would be more complete, like method 2 but offer the speed and uptime of method 1?
 
I think you're kind of hosed because everything is all on one disk. You're going to have to use some third party utility to manage the partitions.

Man...someone really screwed you over. I love inheriting that shit.

I'm not sure whats on all the volumes, but could you make three more volumes from the 200GB free space and move E, G, and H. Then you could remove the old volumes and extend C: into that freespace.
 
OK so you say this is a DC?

If your running with redundant DCs you should be able to take down the server without affecting much else. And surely as a government entity you have redundancy built in?:confused:


if its hosting files then you could robocopy them somewhere else for the meantime.

Personally id be formatting and rebuilding that machine.

oh and you could run: http://windirstat.info/ and check to see which files are taking up the most space.. its a very useful small tool (and it has a pacman animation :) )
 
Demon10000 said:
I'm not sure whats on all the volumes, but could you make three more volumes from the 200GB free space and move E, G, and H. Then you could remove the old volumes and extend C: into that freespace.
Click to expand...

Can't, they're all part of the same logical partition, moving stuff around within the logical partition won't free up space in front of it. That 200GB of unallocated space actually came from the E: drive.


Flakes said:
OK so you say this is a DC?

If your running with redundant DCs you should be able to take down the server without affecting much else. And surely as a government entity you have redundancy built in?:confused:


if its hosting files then you could robocopy them somewhere else for the meantime.

Personally id be formatting and rebuilding that machine.

oh and you could run: http://windirstat.info/ and check to see which files are taking up the most space.. its a very useful small tool (and it has a pacman animation :) )
Click to expand...

It's not my network so I can't recall for sure what roles and services are offered, but I believe this hosts financial software, redirected folders, FSMO roles, and handful of other small but critical roles. Moving some of the stuff WOULD be pretty easy but things like the financial software I'm unsure of...I'll bring it up and see how they feel about doing it this way. This IS a government entity...a city hall actually...for an economically impoverished city with terrible financial leadership. There's a 'Shopping List' of about $80k in needed hardware replacements for the network that's existed for the last couple years in which the city has only approved of about $4k of it....stuff like moving off Windows XP and 2003...you know....minor things :rolleyes:

Trust me, if you were to come in and do an analysis of this network, you'd have a heart attack with the amount of problems that there are. We've significantly improved it since taking it on and it works 90% of the time...8% of that being ISP failures, 2% being things like....oh I dunno....WATER dripping into the switch closets...ya....its a good time, lol.


This network's admin likes to use Treesize, basically the same thing, windirstat just has a nifty graphic to go along with it. I personally use windirstat on my network though.
 
cyclone3d said:
Soooo.. what heppens if that drive dies? Is it at least in some sort of redundant RAID array?

What about fixing it after hours?

You could also move the boot partition over to the 200GB space.
http://www.partitionwizard.com/partitionmanager/boot-partition.html
Click to expand...

Its either RAID1 or RAID5 array so there is single drive failure redundancy there. After hours fixing is what will be done, just trying to do it in the most expedient manner, this isn't a strictly 9-5 office job, work is always being done in some manner utilizing the network.

I've run through the restore process on a VM so I think I'll just suggest that this is the way to do it and work on getting it done. Thanks for the input guys.
 
Get a downtime window. Boot up to GParted. Resize partitions properly.
 
REDYOUCH said:
Get a downtime window. Boot up to GParted. Resize partitions properly.
Click to expand...

Yeah, GParted should be able to do this. However there's a huge caveat here: it isn't perfect, MAKE BACKUPS. Stuff can and will go wrong if you don't have one.

Note that it will take quite a while to shovel around that much data.
 
If you can obtain some temporary server resources, (possibly even pressing a decent PC into service), I'd stand up a temporary Esxi host and convert the DC to a VM.

This way you can take the old server offline and move the VM online with minimum down time. Once you know the new system can temporary do the job, you can rebuild old server as another Esxi host and move the DC back.

Just make sure you create all the volumes as separate VHDK's, that way, you can expand them in the future.
 
Actually, we ended up using AOMEI Partition Manager Lite...Did the job, though with a little bit of a hiccup. I used the software on a Monday or Tuesday night and during the process it said "A restart may be required to complete this action". Well, it completed each of its moves but never restarted the machine so I thought, awesome. Thursday, users started reporting that they couldn't log into their machines, the server that had the partitions resized as well as a couple other servers couldnt log into the network either. They worked at it for like four hours but were worried about rebooting the server because they couldn't find the key for the faceplate (2U rack mount). I came in, pushed the button on the side to show them how to remove the faceplate (wasn't locked) and told them they could also reboot the server from the cmd using 'shutdown /m'. Server rebooted, ran a checkdisk and found some corruptions that it was able to fix and then everything was back up and running properly.

This server that had its partitions resized is the FSMO holder and I think when the software resized the partitions, it also locked them until a restart was conducted. One of those partitions that was resized contained the Sysvol/Netlogon. So with the partitions locked, the files couldn't be accessed to authenticate users. I guess I shouldn't have made the assumption that if a restart was required, regardless of the warning, it would have restarted itself to complete the action.

Thanks for all the suggestions though guys, I appreciate it.
 
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