Hyper-V and Visual Studio 2008 SP1

So I wanted to post a little bit about my adventure with Visual Studio 2008 SP1.  I have a virtual machine that has Visual Studio 2008 installed on it.  But it only has about 2 GB of free hard drive space on it.  So when I went to install this service pack, it gave me an error because it didn’t have enough hard drive space.

So thus began my adventure to try to get enough disk space to install the service pack.

Extending the drive

My first thought was that I could just allocate more space for my .vhd file and allow it to grow.  Everything was going great with that, I was able to make it larger and when I booted up the VM, I saw the additional space in Computer Management.  But when I tried to “Extend Volume” on the hard drive, I got an error because it is the system volume.  So that wasn’t an option.

Copy the files

So then I attempted to just create a new, larger drive and copy all the files onto that new drive.  But this failed because it didn’t have the correct things set to be recognized as a bootable drive.

The solution I found

So the way I found to get around this was to use this really helpful post I found here.  The Windows Automation Installation Kit was very helpful and allowed me to move all of my files to a new drive and set it up correctly.  This allowed me to have the necessary hard drive space to install the Service Pack and not lose anything that I had already installed.

Although it was a lot of work, it really was something useful to know about.  That is why I wanted to post about it here.  If you come across the need to have more hard drive space on your system drive in a VM, hopefully these steps will help you as well.

I wish there was an easier way to extend a system volume.  That would make this trivial.