Resizing a Windows Virtual PC 2007 disk

I love challenges at work. Recently I had to import a large volume of laboratory data into a virtual testing environment. It went OK until I ran out of virtual disk space in my Virtual PC.

Unfortunately, there is no native way to expand the size of a virtual hard drive (vhd) file in Virtual PC 2007. After a few minutes of searching the Web, I stumbled across a Web site that showed the process.

The resizing tool download was free (after Web site registration) and worked flawlessly. I had difficulty getting gparted working under Virtual PC (no surprise there since it's a linux-based product forced to work under Windows). A few magical command line options during the gparted boot (vga=791 noreplace-paravirt) did the trick. The virtual PC now thinks it has a 25 GB disk and the data load can continue.