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Remove Windows recovery partition to extend drive

There is a common issue on Windows to have a disk blocked from Windows recovery partition. In that way, if you extend the physical disk (virtual environments) you cannot extend from Operating system side.

Windows Recovery partition blocking C:\ to be extended

A recovery partition is a partition on the disk that helps to restore the factory settings of the OS (operating system) if there is some kind of system failure. This partition has no drive letter, and you can use only Help in Disk Management. In my case I did not need this partition and I was able to delete it with the below steps:

select disk 0 select volume 3 (3 was the id of my recovery partition)
select recovery partition in order to delete from diskpart
delete volume ovveride

After those steps you will be able to extend your disk.

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Disk Conversion Hyper-V vhd to vhdx – Cannot attach new disk on Virtual machine

Hyper-V includes a tool that can convert vhd disks to vhdx which is the newer version and should be used on production environments.

Sometimes the below error can occur which prevents one from attaching the new disk (vhdx) to the virtual machine needed. It seems as the new disk after the conversion to be locked and only by rebooting host the disk can be attached.

The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process

This issue happens because the original disk is attached on the virtual machine during the conversion. The disk device should be attached as stated from Microsoft (link below). After the conversion the new disk can be attached and will not be locked from the host.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/hyper-v/convert-vhd?view=win10-ps

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Map Network drive location on Windows Server

The easiest way to perform massive identical installations on web servers that are located on the same network (VLAN) is through a network map of the remote location. With only two steps you can perform remote installations.

Firstly select map a network drive and assign a drive letter to the remote location.

Select map network drive

Select your preferred drive letter.

Map your network location server to a Drive letter
Open a terminal and just go to the specified location. In my case it was Z:

change directory to your remote location through a cmd or GUI and perform your installations.

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Extend Disk with diskpart.exe – Windows server 2003

Below is the procedure on how to extend a disk space on Windows server 2003 through diskpart.exe. Tool is located under C:\Windows\system32\diskpart.exe

The extra disk space is provided through VMware hypervisor.

after the extend from VMware disk space is available on Disk Management.
commands to extend disk space