Evaggelos Balaskas - System Engineer

A visual guide on how to enlarge your windows disk image aka windows extend volume

I have a windows 10 qemu-kvm virtual machine for business purposes.
Every now and then, I have to resize it’s disk image!

This is my visual guide, so next time I will not waste any time figure this out, again!

Resize Disk image

The first step is to resize the disk image from the command line:

# ls -l win10.qcow2
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 58861813760 Nov 17 10:04 win10.qcow2

# du -h win10.qcow2
55G win10.qcow2

#  qemu-img info win10.qcow2
image: win10.qcow2
file format: qcow2
virtual size: 55G (59055800320 bytes)
disk size: 55G
cluster_size: 65536
Format specific information:
    compat: 1.1
    lazy refcounts: false
    refcount bits: 16
    corrupt: false

#  qemu-img resize win10.qcow2 +10G
Image resized.

# qemu-img info win10.qcow2
image: win10.qcow2
file format: qcow2
virtual size: 65G (69793218560 bytes)
disk size: 55G
cluster_size: 65536
Format specific information:
    compat: 1.1
    lazy refcounts: false
    refcount bits: 16
    corrupt: false

Windows Problem - extend volume

Windows can not extend a volume if the free partition is not next to the “need-to-be” extened volume.

So we have to move the free partition next to C: drive

System Rescue Cd

Here comes system rescue cd !

Gparted

with gparted you can move to the end of the virtual disk the ntfs recovery partition:

Computer Management - Disk Management

It’s time to extend our partition:

Finish