While attempting to create some Storage Spaces in Server 2016 today, I presented a bunch of ‘new’ disks and some of them were flagged CanPool as false?
CanPool simply means the disk it available to be added to a storage pool, Id just removed all the arrays from these drives so I was confused?
Solution
Just because we’re on Powershell does not mean I can’t go old school! Launch Diskpart and list disk. You can see some of the drives (the ones I’m having trouble with have a partition on them, the asterisk in the GPT (GUID Partition Table) column gives that away?
WARNING: I know the drives, (apart from the 100GB one,) SHOULD be blank, and I know I can erase them safely, MAKE SURE the disk(s) you are looking at are not in use, and do not have important data on them!
To clean/erase
[box]
select disk {x}
online disk
clean
offline disk
[/box]
If it tells you;
Diskpart has encountered an error: The media is wrote protected.
See the system event log for more information
[box]
attributes disk clear readonly
clean
offline disk
[/box]
Note: In some cases I’ve had to physically reboot the server, before all the disks were CanPool = True.
Related Articles, References, Credits, or External Links
This article is primarily geared towards making your guest virtual machines hard drives LARGER, If you want to SHRINK or make the drive smaller then see the following article.
1. On the properties of the VM select the hard disk in question and locate its size.
2. Enter the new size and hit OK. Note: Making the drive size smaller, will have no affect, if you want to do that clone the drive. If the option is “Greyed out” then make sure you DO NOT have any snapshots for this machine.
Re-sizing the guests “Volume” Option 1 – Graphically
Note: To do this using diskpart skip forward to number 10.
3. On the guest > Right click “My Computer” > Manage > Locate “Disk Management”. You will see there’s some free space that’s appeared on the end of the drive, (Click action > Re-scan if you can’t see it).
4. Simply right click the existing volume and select “Extend Volume”.
5. Next.
6. Copy in the extra space you want to assign (all of it probably) > Next.
7. Finish.
8. All the physical drive should now be committed.
9. And just to be sure, look in “My Computer” the drive is now 300 GB.
Re-sizing the guests “Volume” Option 2 – From Command Line with diskpart
10. Start > run > cmd{enter}
[box]diskpart list volume< select volume x –Where x is the volume number of the volume to be re sized[/box]
11. The final command is simply extend (This uses ALL the available free space.) Note the volume size in the picture below has jumped up by 40 GB.
Resizing a System (boot) Partition.
Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 can do this quite happily. Older versions of Windows do not like having their system drive re sized, you see the following error if you try,
Error: The volume you have selected may not be extended. Please select another volume and try again.
Option 1 (Connect this drive to another machine)
In a virtual environment this is much simpler, but even if its a real physical hard drive, you can put it into another server and re size it. In an ESX environment simply do the following,
1. Shut down the machine that needs its drive re sizing, then go to another virtual machine’s properties and select add.
2. Hard Disk > Next.
3. Select “Use existing virtual disk” > Next.
4. Browse to the the drive we want to re size > Next.
5. Next.
6. Finish.
7. Now on the VM (Action > Re-scan disks). You will see the drive, and it’s not listed as a system drive, so you can extend it using any of the methods listed above.
8. For example, heres the drive re sized using disport.
9. when you have re sized the drive go back to the properties of the machine you have connected it to, and remove it.
10. OK.
11. Now power on the original VM and drive will be re sized.
Option 2 (Re size the Windows volume with GParted)
Note: This will work for a physical server as well.
1. Here’s our system drive with some nice shiny free space.
2. Make sure the server in question can boot from CD, in VMware do the following to boot to the machines BIOS, for a real server watch the screen as the server boots for instructions (Usually F10, F1 or Esc but differs depending on vendor).
3. Locate the boot order and make sure CD/DVD is at the top of the list.
4. Download GParted burn the image to CD, if you are working on a real server (use ImgBurn if your stuck). Or simply point the VM to the iso image, and boot the machine in question from it. At the welcome screen press Enter.
5. Use your arrow and tab keys to select Don’t touch the keymap > OK.
6. Pick a language.
7. We want to launch the GUI (X Windows), so select 0 (Zero).
8. Select Re size/Move > Drag the arrow to include the free space > Re size/Move.
9. Apply
10. Apply.
11. Close.
12. Click GParted > Quit.
13. Exit > Reboot/Shutdown > OK.
14. Remove the CD/ISO and press Enter.
15. The guest will run chkdsk the firs time it boots. This is normal don’t panic.
16. Once booted the volume will be re sized.
Shrink a Windows Partition with diskpart
1. To actually make the volume smaller with diskpart, the initial commands are the same.
2. If you use “shrink” on its own is will shrink the drive as much as it can (I cannot think of any situation where you would do this!). So to shrink the volume by 10 GB simply issue a “shrink minimum 10240”. (The figure in in MB).
Related Articles, References, Credits, or External Links
This weekend I needed to install Windows 7 on my shiny new Acer HTPC, but having no internal CD/DVD drive I needed to do this via USB.
Quite a few times now I’ve needed to install Windows (Particularly Server 2008), on a machine that has no DVD Drive. You can now install both products from a bootable USB drive by doing either of the the following.
Note: You will need a USB Drive with enough free space on it to hold the Windows setup files (Windows 7 and Server 2008 require 4GB ish, depending on versions).
Solution
Option 1 (The quick and dirty techie way!)
1. Pop in your USB Drive > open a command windows and execute the following commands:
[box]diskpart {enter} [launches the disk partition program]
list {enter}[Displays all the disks you can work with]
select disk x {enter}[Select the USB Drive number]
clean {enter}[Wipes the USB Drive][/box]
2. Execute the following commands:
[box]create partition primary {enter} [Creates a new primary partition]
select partition 1{enter}[Select the partition you have just made]
active {enter}[Makes the partition bootable]
exit {enter}[Closes diskpart][/box]
3. Now use a utility like 7-Zip to extract the Windows Install media .ISO file to your USB drive.
4. Now boot your device from USB, (Enter the BIOS boot section and change the boot order), or press the key the machine says will load the boot options when you first turn it on.
Note: Some machines require you to change USB emulation before you can boot from them like so.
