How to resize a Windows guest vm boot partition in ESX Part II: manual method

In one of my previous posts I showed how to resize a Windows virtual machine's C: (boot) drive using VMware Converter. In this post I will show how to do it without the Converter, instead utlizing widely available tools and command line.

First I need to putty over to my ESX host and expand the disk here using the vmkfstools utility:

I picked a test machine called VCBTest to perform this procedure on.

The disk expansion takes place immediately:

Once the disk is resized, I need to use a 3rd party utility called gparted to resize the boot partition in Windows. I downloaded gparted from http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php

and copied it to my Data Store. I then configured the VCBTest vm to boot from that gparted iso:

gparted iso is based on a Linux distro:

Once gparted boots , I can modify the size of the partition:

After the resize is done, I boot up that vm and when it comes up, the boot drive is properly re-sized to 12 Gb: