Tag Archives: Virtual Disk

Fix virtual disk resizing issues with Gparted

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Introduction

I’ve discussed resizing virtual hard disks in Windows Hyper-V before. In Windows Server 212 R2 and the VHDX format even allows us to extend and shrink the virtual disks on line. For this they need to be attached to a vSCSI controller.

Extending virtual hard disks is something that rarely causes issues unless we don’t have enough disk space. Shrinking virtual disks has a few more potential issues to deal with which I discussed before. In that article I also showed ways to deal with those challenges.

One problem you can encounter is unused space that’s not located at the end of a virtual disk. This cannot be used to allow shrinking a virtual hard disk, the unused space has to be at the need of the disk. I mentioned using Gparted to fix this particular issue in a previous blog post You cannot shrink a VHDX file because you cannot shrink the volume on the virtual disk . Today we’ll show you how to fix virtual disk resizing issues with Gparted.

When doing P2V, V2V or even P2P the need to deal with legacy partition / volume layouts and other disk housekeeping tasks often arises. While the Windows inbox tools have gotten way better over the years we’re often left with lacking capabilities. Luckily there is Gparted the open source partition editor. Note that the use cases for Gparted go way beyond this particular use case.

A note on Gparted

With modern guest operating systems, you’ll want to use the latest x64 build of Gparted you can find. At the time of writing that’s 0.25.0-1 Make sure you grab the x64 version unless you’re still running older x86 edition of an operating system. I kind of hoping you’re not by now, but hey, I understand if you encounter them still.

The good news is that GParted works with both MBR and GPT disks, which is great. I don’t know about you but we’ve been using GPT by default everywhere we can for many years now to get rid of the 2TB limit. The bad news for some will be that, for now, it can only detect ReFS but cannot handle actions against it (yet?).

More information can be found at their Wiki and download are here

Fix virtual disk resizing issues with Gparted

A classic example of a disk with unused space that cannot be leveraged to shrink a virtual disk is the one where unused disk space is not at the end of the disk. Shrinking virtual disk with the inbox windows tools only works when that unused space is at the end of the disk and not in between partitions / volumes. Gparted can move a volume to deal with this. Another example is when system or other files are located at the end of an existing volume that has tons of free space but the files are blocking shrinking of the volume to create unused space that would allow the virtual disk to be shrunk. The latter can be dealt with by defragmenting the disk although you might need tools that can do off line defragmentation to move system files or you can also resize that volume with Gparted.

We’ll demonstrate this the use of Gparted with one such example, unused space in between partitions on a virtual disk. When that’s taken care of you can shrink the volume with Hyper-V manager.

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What I prefer to do is to create a temporary virtual machine to mount the ISO of Gparted and a copy the disk you want to work on. That leaves all the settings of the original virtual machine intact and working on a copy is save guard just in case things go wrong. When all went well you swap out the original disk on the production virtual machine for the one you edited. Naturally you can also do the work on the existing virtual machine. Which I what I’ll do here as a demo.

Step by Step

You can use a generation 2 virtual machine without issues as long as you make sure to disable secure boot. While on Windows Server 2016 you can select the correct boot template for secure boot with a Linux VM that won’t do the job here as the Gparted image doesn’t support secure boot.

Also note that a generation 2 virtual machine doesn’t have a virtual DVD drive by default so you’ll need to add one.

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Make sure the DVD drive is at the top of the boot order. That way the virtual machine will boot the GParted image from DVD automatically. If it doesn’t, some setting is wrong.

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Let the boot process continue and answer the request based on your needs or preference. I normally just go for the defaults (Keyboard, language, …)

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The GParted GUI will open for you automatically. You then need to select the correct disk to work on. This is one reason to use a dedicated workhorse virtual machine: less risk of selecting the wrong disk. Here is choose my 100GB data disk with the 2 volume and the unused space located between them.

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I select the partition I want to move and hit the resize button

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… and in the resize/move GUI is drag the partition at the end of the disk to the as much to the front as I can (green arrow)

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The GUI shows you layout you’ll get a result of your actions.

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Click on apply …

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You’ll get a warning you should heed and know what you are doing befor you continue. As it’s a data only disk we’re good.

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We hit OK and we’re warned that backups are important if thing go South. With virtual machines working on a copy of the virtual disk is also a good option. Better safe than sorry.

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We click on Apply and let Gparted work. I hope it’s clear that we do don’t shut down or power off the virtual machine during this time.

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Gparted is done. The move went successfully. Click on close.

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We now shut down the virtual machine.

Make sure you set re-enable secure boot if you were using it with a generation 2 virtual machine and check you have the correct template for your virtual machine.

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Remove the Gparted ISO image from the DVD. That will also remove it from the boot options where we set it as first in the boot order. Also don’t forget to remove the DVD, if you don’t want it there anymore.

Let’s boot our virtual machine and take a look at disk management:

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The picture in your virtual machine shows a volume layout in the guest on a virtual hard disk that we can shrink now using Hyper-V manager or PowerShell if we want to. Cool!

Conclusion

Sometimes the in box tools to deal with disks and volumes can’t handle specific situations but that doesn’t mean you’re stuck. We discussed how to fix virtual disk resizing issues with Gparted. This is a powerful open source tool that can be used for many disk and volume based operations on both physical and virtual disks. I’ve even used it to move my home workstation from SATA HHD to SATA SSD drives. If you’re ever in a situation where you need a very good partition / volume editor give it a go. I’ve been using it ages and it absolutely rocks!

Recover From Expanding VHD or VDHX Files On VMs With Checkpoints

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So you’ve expanded the virtual disk (VHD/VHDX) of a virtual machine that has checkpoints (or snapshots as they used to be called) on it. Did you forget about them?  Did you really leave them lingering around for that long?  Bad practice and not supported (we don’t have production snapshots yet, that’s for Windows Server 2016). Anyway your virtual machine won’t boot. Depending on the importance of that VM you might be chewed out big time or ridiculed. But what if you don’t have a restore that works? Suddenly it’s might have become a resume generating event.

All does not have to be lost. Their might be hope if you didn’t panic and made even more bad decisions. Please, if you’re unsure what to do, call an expert, a real one, or at least some one who knows real experts. It also helps if you have spare disk space, the fast sort if possible and a Hyper-V node where you can work without risk. We’ll walk you through the scenarios for both a VHDX and a VHD.

How did you get into this pickle?

If you go to the Edit Virtual Hard Disk Wizard via the VM settings it won’t allow for that if the VM has checkpoints, whether the VM is online or not.

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VHDs cannot be expanded on line. If the VM had checkpoints it must have been shut down when you expanded the VHD. If you went to the Edit Disk tool in Hyper-V Manager directly to open up the disk you don’t get a warning. It’s treated as a virtual disk that’s not in use. Same deal if you do it in PowerShell

Resize-VHD -Path “C:\ClusterStorage\Volume2\DidierTest06\Virtual Hard Disks\RuinFixedVHD.vhd” -SizeBytes 15GB

That just works.

VHDXs can be expanded on online if they’re attached to a vSCSI controller. But if the VM has checkpoints it will not allow for expanding.

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So yes, you deliberately shut it down to be able to do it with the the Edit Disk tool in Hyper-V Manager. I know, the warning message was not specific enough but consider this. The Edit disk tool when launched directly has no idea of what the disk you’re opening is used for, only if it’s online / locked.

Anyway the result is the same for the VM whether it was a VHD or a VHDX. An error when you start it up.

[Window Title]
Hyper-V Manager

[Main Instruction]
An error occurred while attempting to start the selected virtual machine(s).

[Content]
‘DidierTest06’ failed to start.

Synthetic SCSI Controller (Instance ID 92ABA591-75A7-47B3-A078-050E757B769A): Failed to Power on with Error ‘The chain of virtual hard disks is corrupted. There is a mismatch in the virtual sizes of the parent virtual hard disk and differencing disk.’.

Virtual disk ‘C:\ClusterStorage\Volume2\DidierTest06\Virtual Hard Disks\RuinFixedVHD_8DFF476F-7A41-4E4D-B41F-C639478E3537.avhd’ failed to open because a problem occurred when attempting to open a virtual disk in the differencing chain, ‘C:\ClusterStorage\Volume2\DidierTest06\Virtual Hard Disks\RuinFixedVHD.vhd’: ‘The size of the virtual hard disk is not valid.’.

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You might want to delete the checkpoint but the merge will only succeed for the virtual disk that have not been expanded.  You actually don’t need to do this now, it’s better if you don’t, it saves you some stress and extra work. You could remove the expanded virtual disks from the VM. It will boot but in many cased the missing data on those disks are very bad news. But al least you’ve proven the root cause of your problems.

If you inspect the AVVHD/AVHDX file you’ll get an error that states

The differencing virtual disk chain is broken. Please reconnect the child to the correct parent virtual hard disk.

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However attempting to do so will fail in this case.

Failed to set new parent for the virtual disk.

The Hyper-V Virtual Machine Management service encountered an unexpected error: The chain of virtual hard disks is corrupted. There is a mismatch in the virtual sizes of the parent virtual hard disk and differencing disk. (0xC03A0017).

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Is there a fix?

Let’s say you don’t have a backup (shame on you). So now what? Make copies of the VHDX/AVHDX or VHD/AVHD and save guard those. You can also work on copies or on the original files.I’ll just the originals as this blog post is already way too long. If you. Note that some extra disk space and speed come in very handy now. You might even copy them of to a lab server. Takes more time but at least you’re not working on a production host than.

Working on the original virtual disk files (VHD/AVHD and / or VHDX/AVHDX)

If you know the original size of the VHDX before you expanded it you can shrink it to exactly that. If you don’t there’s PowerShell to the rescue if you want to find out the minimum size.

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But even better you can shrink it to it’s minimum size, it’s a parameter!

Resize-VHD -Path “C:\ClusterStorage\Volume2\DidierTest06\Virtual Hard Disks\RuinFixedVHD.vhd” -ToMinimumSize

Now you not home yet. If you restart the VM right now it will fail … with the following error:

‘DidierTest06’ failed to start. (Virtual machine ID 7A54E4DB-7CCB-42A6-8917-50A05354634F)

‘DidierTest06’ Synthetic SCSI Controller (Instance ID 92ABA591-75A7-47B3-A078-050E757B769A): Failed to Power on with Error ‘The chain of virtual hard disks is corrupted. There is a mismatch in the identifiers of the parent virtual hard disk and differencing disk.’ (0xC03A000E). (Virtual machine ID 7A54E4DB-7CCB-42A6-8917-50A05354634F)

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What you need to do is reconnect the AVHDX to it’s parent and choose to ignore the ID mismatch. You can do this via Edit Disk in Hyper-V Manager of in PowerShell. For more information on manually merging & repairing checkpoints see my blogs on this subject here. In this post I’ll just show the screenshots as walk through.

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Once that’s done you’re VHDX is good to go.

For a VHD you can’t shrink that with the inbox tools. There is however a free command line tool that can do that names VHDTool.exe. The original is hard to find on the web so here is the installer if you need it. You only need the executable, which is portable actually, don’t install this on a production server. It has a repair switch to deal with just this occurrence!

Here’s an example of my lab …

D:\SysAdmin>VhdTool.exe /repair “C:\ClusterStorage\Volume2\DidierTest06\Virtual Hard Disks\RuinFixedVHD.vhd” “C:\ClusterStorage\Volume2\DidierTest06\Virtual Hard Disks\RuinFixedVHD_8DFF476F-7A41-4E4D-B41F-C639478E3537.avhd”

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That’s it for the VHD …

You’re back in business!  All that’s left to do is get rid of the checkpoints. So you delete them. If you wanted to apply them an get rid of the delta, you could have just removed the disks, re-added the VHD/VHDX and be done with it actually. But in most of these scenarios you want to keep the delta as you most probably didn’t even realize you still had checkpoints around. Zero data loss Winking smile.

Conclusion

Save your self the stress, hassle and possibly expense of hiring an expert.  How? Please do not expand a VHD or VHDX of a virtual machine that has checkpoints. It will cause boot issues with the expanded virtual disk or disks! You will be in a stressful, painful pickle where you might not get out of if you make the wrong decisions and choices!

As a closing note, you must have have backups and restores that you have tested. Do not rely on your smarts and creativity or that others, let alone luck. Luck runs out. Otions run out. Even for the best and luckiest of us. VEEAM has save my proverbial behind a few times already.

Online Resizing Of Hyper-V Virtual Disks Is Possible in Windows 2012 R2

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Windows Server 2012 R2 brought us the ability to resize virtual disks on line. This was a long sought after feature for many of us. It can be done via the GUI or with PowerShell. I do note however that quite often people have some problems when first using this capability. So we’ll go over the rules & prerequisites here.

Listed below are the important factors to keep in mind

  1. It has to be a VHDX
  2. Works for both generation 1 and generation 2 virtual machines
  3. It needs to be attached to a vSCSI controller. Remember this when dealing with with generation 1 virtual machines. In particular note that this means you cannot live resize the system disk as that IDE only (can’t boot from SCSI in generation 1).
  4. The virtual disk cannot be a shared VDHX (it’s on my feature request list for vNext)
  5. You can extend a virtual disk
  6. You can shrink a virtual disk
  7. This feature can leverage ODX for speed when available. The speed of this is quite addictive.

Some notes where people seem to make some other mistakes

You’ll note that you cannot shrink a virtual disk that has no unallocated disk space on the disk inside the virtual machine. When you see this picture inside of the virtual machines you can shrink your VHDX if all the above factors are in order.image

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If there is no unallocated disk space the option to shrink the VHDX won’t even show up in the GUI.

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This means you’ll first need to shrink the volume inside the virtual machine if all disk space has already been allocated.

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(Like wise don’t forget to expand the volume inside the VM to be able to use the added space you see show up as unallocated space on the disk.)

The below image is a great summary of the above

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Legacy OS in the VM?

It’s also important to note that an OS inside a VM (Windows Server 2003 comes to mind) that does not allow the expansion or shrinking of volumes means you will need a 3rd party tool to do the same. I use GParted, a free partition editor for these scenarios.