I think someone else mentioned this but figured I would state it again. I am running Mac OS X (not by choice) and set up a Windows 7 Home Premium virtual os. Of course I stupidly took the default 20 GB dynamic disk option. After installing some of my development stuff, I was basically out of space.

So these were the steps I did to resize the partion.

1) Shutdown the virtual Windows OS.
2) In terminal, ran “VboxManage modifyhd –resize 80000 nameofimage.vdi”
3) Startup the virtual Windows OS again.
4) Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Storage -> Disk Management
5) Disk 0 showed the 100 MB partition, 20 GB NTFS C:, and 60 GB unallocated.
6) Right click the “C:” partition (either up in the list or the graphical representation) and select “Extend Volume”.
7) It came up with 1 or 2 screens that I did not make any changes on and just clicked through them (sorry didn’t think it would work so didn’t keep track of their names and such).
8) Partition now extended to 80 GB (in just a few seconds).

I didn’t need to run any other utilities except VboxManage. Also this was from a default partitioning of a Win 7 install. I hadn’t converted the partition to a dynamic disk or anything else.

Hope this helps.

I had the same problem with win2008 r2 on win7. I tried Rob’s idea and it didn’t work initially, but only because it wasn’t set as my primary partition.
in order for it to work u need to right click your new image file inside the settings>storage and choose SATA port 0. Then load your windows setup again, choose repair and either use the command line with bootrec /fixboot or let it automatically fix it for you.

Thank you very much, Nick!

Advice:

1. Do a backup before the start. You can export appliance (requires less space but more time) or copy the whole VM.
2. Delete snapshots if you have them.
3. If you are paranoid do a backup again. Just in case.
2. Make sure that you have enough time.
For example in my case (AMD Phenom 9850 x4, RAM 8G, x2 7200rpm HDDs so my copy operations are faster than usual, VM size: 30Gb -> 80Gb):
– Export appliance: 20 min.
– Delete snapshots: 1 hour. I had four snapshots and it took from 15 to 20 minutes to delete each of them. 4 * 15 = 60 min
– Do a backup again: 10-20 min. I am paranoid. This time I copied the whole VM and it took 10 min.
– gparted operations ~30..40 min
– Windows restore and chkdsk activity: ~15 min
Total: 2h 15m to 2h 35m.

Anyway:
My (very hard-core) solution was to use “dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=512″ to duplicate the disk sector-by-sector instead of using GParted. Windows machine booted like charm, the only thing remaining was to extend volume using Windows Storage Manager (from Server manager console). Takes a bit longer than GParted, but worked for me.

Aside note is – few months ago I converted real machine to virtual one and discovered, that Windows Vista (and probably Windows 2008 too) does store crucial boot information… outside of the areas described by partition table information. No comments about, I would not believe, but have seen it by my own eyes. Proven. No tools were able to migrate real machine to virtual one. The only successful tool was…. “dd”. First, performed sector-by-sector copy, than later, used anything else to convert image to VHD/VDI/whatever. Went excellent.
I’ve lost a week trying numerous tools, before I discovered, that there is information outside of the partitions defined….

Anyway – thanks for posting. Your instruction is very good and does work excellent with Windows 2003 server quest. I just expanded another machine using your instruction. Just failed on 2008 R2 and had to go with “dd”.
Kind regards
Emil

I found a solution in the gparted forums:

This problem is similar to the problem described in the FAQ where resizing your Vista boot partition renders your OS unbootable. In this case the Vista install media can be used to repair the problem.

I found that resizing a a Windows 2008 Server boot partition produces the same result. Booting off of the install media does not give you a menu that allows you to fix the problem however. What you get is a menu to bring up a command prompt or run memory diagnostics.

To fix the problem you need to select the command prompt option. From there change into the X:\sources\recovery\ directory. There you will find a program called StartRep.exe. Run this program and your boot partition will be fixed and life will be good again. big_smile

http://gparted-forum.surf4.info/viewtopic.php?id=13530

Nicolas