Increased the size of the VDisk in the VM GUI but VM is not recognizing change

[Keyser Soze]

I managed to get a Windows 8.1 VM running with 20GB (Qcow). I increased the size of the VDisk to 30GB but when I went back to the VM it still saw it as 20GB.

[dirtysanchez]

Do you mean the drive in File Explorer is still 20GB, or in disk management?  If you expand the underlying virtual disk, Windows does not automatically expand the partition. You need to do it manually in disk management.

[bungee91]

If this is your primary Windows installed disk image, I'm not sure if you can expand it easily within Windows.

 

I had a secondary disk image (a media storage image that I used within a Windows VM) that I wanted to resize bigger, and I expanded the partition using a VM of Parted Magic (used to be free, you can likely still find it). There are likely some free tools to do this also, I just had experience with Parted Magic, and it was easy for me to do it this way.

[Keyser Soze]

thanks for the help. yeah i had to go into the Windows VM and extend the volume in disk management to the new size. so simple  lol

[Ned]

Is it possible to go the other direction - i.e. shrink the size of the virtual disk/Windows VM volume?  I'm assuming once you make it bigger you cannot go back?

[dirtysanchez]

Is it possible to go the other direction - i.e. shrink the size of the virtual disk/Windows VM volume?  I'm assuming once you make it bigger you cannot go back?

 

Within windows, yes. Not sure about the virtual disk within unRAID.

[Ned]

How do you increase the size of the vdisk once the vm is created?  I built a Win7 VM and when I go into the unraid VM GUI and edit the properties of that VM, the vdisk size and vdisk type options for the primary vdisk are not there anymore.

[Keyser Soze]

do not click on the icon. Click on the name/text to the right of the VM icon.

[Ned]

do not click on the icon. Click on the name/text to the right of the VM icon.

 

Very cool, thanks!  That hyperlink was not obvious to me for some reason :-)

 

Maybe you also know the answer to my other question as well... is it possible to decrease the size of the virtual disk or will that mess up my Windows VM?

[Keyser Soze]

The unraid gui interface won't let you decrease it. It says the value that you entered should be at least the size of the current vdisk

[itimpi]

do not click on the icon. Click on the name/text to the right of the VM icon.

 

Very cool, thanks!  That hyperlink was not obvious to me for some reason :-)

 

Maybe you also know the answer to my other question as well... is it possible to decrease the size of the virtual disk or will that mess up my Windows VM?

Decreasing the size of a vDisk is very tricky as it is not easy to ensure that none of the space you want to remove has been used by the VM.  It is certainly not anything that is supported as standard via the GUI.

[Ned]

do not click on the icon. Click on the name/text to the right of the VM icon.

 

Very cool, thanks!  That hyperlink was not obvious to me for some reason :-)

 

Maybe you also know the answer to my other question as well... is it possible to decrease the size of the virtual disk or will that mess up my Windows VM?

Decreasing the size of a vDisk is very tricky as it is not easy to ensure that none of the space you want to remove has been used by the VM.  It is certainly not anything that is supported as standard via the GUI.

 

Thanks for the replies... I assumed that would be the case but just wanted to confirm.  I can't really even think of a use case where one might want to decrease the size of the vdisk since usually it's the other way around that you'd potentially want to go but I just wanted to know if the capability was there.  At least you can increase it later if needed which is great.

 

Thanks!

[Ned]

I'm running unraid 6.3.2.  I have a Windows 10 VM that I'm trying to increase the size of the vdisk.img.  I clicked on the name of the VM next to the icon and then changed the capacity of the disk as I've done before... however when I boot up the VM and go into computer management/disk management, it is not showing any increase in available disk space and therefore I cannot expand the partition inside the Windows VM.  Am I missing something here?  Is this not supported anymore?

 

How can I get Windows to see the extra available virtual disk space?

[Ned]

Ok after a few reboots of the VM the unallocated space finally shows up in Windows Disk Management.  However I discovered a new problem - there is a 450MB recovery partition in between the (C:) partition and the new unallocated space which is preventing me from expanding the (C:) partition.

 

How can I do this?  Disk management does not even give an option to delete the recovery partition?

[Ned]

Keep answering my own questions here, sorry about that!  I installed a third party tool that allowed me to delete the recovery partition and then I was able to expand the (C:) partition.  All good now.

[towlyone]

Hi, I'm running unraid 6.3.5. After increasing the size of my Win10VM image (tried gui and qemu-img resize), the new size it not showing in the Windows VM. I did several reboots, changed back to original image size, increased image again - its not showing up under Windows Disk Management. I did this several times before and it always worked flawless after first VM launch. The VM image is saved on a btrfs formatted ssd mounted with the unassigned devices plugin, not shure if I ever changed VM image size not sitting on my cache pool. Help would really be appreciated.

[towlyone]

Problem disappeared after some time / reboots !??? This is some strange behaviour. I did resize partitions before on older Unraid and Windows 10 versions and the new size was showing immediatly after rebooting the VM. So no help needed, but this is something that should get fixed if its not only happening to Ned and myself.