GUI version of diskpart.exe or equivalent on Windows 2003 Server

Question

I have a 95% OS X server shop..and just a handful of Windows servers I occasionally have to mess with... I need to resize some disks on a Windows 2003 box, and am looking for the equivalent of OS X's Disk Utility, if there is such a thing built into Windows 2003 server...Disk Management is not a part of Windows 2003 I am assuming?

Solution 1

"Disk Management" in the Computer Management console is the GUI version of diskpart's functionality - you can resize partitions and perform similar functions from there.

As a gotcha, Windows 2003 can't resize the System partition, you'll need something else for that (or to boot another install of Windows).

Solution 2

Right-click "computer" hit "manage" then enter the disk management node... when and where the expand features was added to the disk management UI however I'm not sure of, it always feels like diskpart is one step ahead of the UI on that in any Windows version.

Comments

[Helvick]

Another gotcha with Disk Manager in Windows 2003 is that it ignores partition alignment and blindly places partitions on the first sectors it finds free. Windows 2008 chooses a 1Meg offset from the start of the drive which is generally a safe choice for alignment purposes but like the W2K3 version doesn't give you any choice. DiskPart is the only official utility included with the OS's that can be used to control alignment.