Help Please - VM install upgrade and space issues

[znelbok]

Hi all

 

I built an Atlas clone a couple of years ago - 5beta12 version - using ESXi 5

 

Its been running fine and its time to upgrade from the beta version of unraid to a stable version.

 

When building, I decided not to use plop, but rather create a hard drive in the guest for the system to boot from.

 

Call it bad judgement, I only crated a 500mb drive - large enough to load unraid onto and a bit of space to spare.

 

Now when it comes time to upgrade, the drive is full and I can;t copy the new files onto it.

 

I cleaded out a couple of the add-ons that I had loaded in - twonky, etc, but I cant create  enough space.

 

Whats the best way forward from here

 

I see two options, but there are questions and concerns on both

 

1 - increase the size of the drive from 500mb to 4GB.  Expanding is easy, but getting the filesystem to use the new full size of the partition is proving troublesome.

 

I copied the virtual disk to another PC running vmware, expanded it OK and then started GParted to take care of the filesystem.  I noticed that it was a fat32 system and GParted stopped with an error and was not able to complete the expansion.

 

2 - Move back to booting from the USB stick.  This means using Plop based on original build info.  I am not sure if the use of Plop is still required for booting from a USB stick in ESXi.

 

My concern here is where is all the raid info kept.  Will the configuration etc be there and will the array be intact?

Are there any other caveats to moving back to booting from the USB stick instead of the virtual hard drive.

 

I need some guidance on the best way forward and you guys are the Gurus to help

 

Mick