Remove system partition?

[Deborah Lane-Olson]

I have a rather odd question, or at least it's the opposite of the question most people ask.  I don't want to expand the system partition, I want to remove it.  Here's the situation: I have an old VM that was originally created by a P2V conversion.  I wasn't very savvy at the time, and I just converted the existing physical hard drive into one virtual hard drive.  The result is that I have a 1TB VMDK file that has both the system partition and a data partition on it.  Now I'm replacing this old VM (which is Windows Server 2003) with a new one that will run Windows 2012 R2.  So, in order not to have to move the 900 or so GB of data that are on this VMDK using the traditional file move process, I was wondering if there's any way to simply REMOVE the system partition and end up with a single 1TB VMDK with just the data on it that I can then remove from the old VM and move to the new one.  So far my searches haven't found any clues as to how this might be done, but I'm hoping some expert here will know of a way, possibly using some kind of V2V conversion process.

Thanks!

[rcporto]

You can use the GParted live CD to boot up the old VM and delete the system partition and resize the data partition to take the free space release by the system partition deletion... and another option is to use vCenter Converter and select convert just the data partition. Take a look at GParted: GParted -- A free application for graphically managing disk device partitions

Note that using vCenter converter you will need some additional free space on datastore to store the new vmdk and that the process of V2V choosing only the data partition will finish with failure status, since the system partition was not copied, but you can ignore this message and get the new vmdk.

[markdjones82]

I will 2nd Richard's options and think the V2V with only converting the 2nd partition and then using that VMDK as an attachment.  Not the cleanest way ot go about it, but it should work given your original system isn't using any pointers etc with the app.

[Deborah Lane-Olson]

After further consideration, I've decided to go with the GParted option. I liked the V2V option, since it seems safer, but I have some storage issues on this ESXi host that will make it pretty much impossible to clone the partition using V2V.

Thanks for the help!

[rcporto]

You're welcome and don't forget mark answers as helpful or correct.

[Mahiee]

Hi - It is just an Information: while P2V just in case if we could have fragmented the source machine drives into dedicated disk on basis of drives it should be useful now to snub your system partition & go with your remaining data partitions.

Moreover now you got a solution (GParted), go for it. Gud Luck.

Regards,

[Deborah Lane-Olson]

Just as a follow-up, I ended up using GParted to manipulate the partitions on the original VMDK disk.  It worked perfectly, and I was able to remove the C: (boot) partition, expand the original D: partition to use all of the drive space, and then attach it to my new server with all files intact. Of course I made sure I had a valid backup of all of the files first just in case of disaster but fortunately I didn't have to use it!