Increase Size of Virtual Hard-disk in Hyper-V
I have a habit of creating virtual machines with small virtual hard disks. While doing some R&D work I create a VM with 25GB hard disk. I had totally abandoned it after using for few weeks. Yesterday I had to do some research on Adobe InDesign Server. After installing IDS it quickly took up all the space and I started getting low disk space warning.
Now was the time to do the inevitable, that is to resize the virtual hard disk.
I had done the drill previously as well and it was (or seemed) quick. I performed following steps:
1. Fire Hyper V MMC and select "Edit Disk" from Actions.
2. Select VHDX file to resize
3. Select Expand operation
4. Specify new size (52GB)
I happily fired the VM. But it still complained about the disk space which was same again (24.66GB).
After some thought I remembered that I missed a vital step. I had to attach the virtual hard disk in Disk Management Console and resize it. Following is what is needed to get bigger hard disk.
1. Open Disk Management Console (diskmgmt.msc) and select Attach VHD from Action menu.
It shows 24.66GB allocated for existing disk and 27GB of fresh space available for use.
2. Right click on existing hard disk and choose Extend Volume from menu.
3. Select all (or what ever you want to use) available space and click Next.
After rebooting into VM, you will get bigger hard disk.
I had to struggle in past to figure out how to resize VHDs. Hope this writing will help me in future in case I miss something.