Cannot expand disk in VMware vSphere Client

Since searching online did not provide a clear answer for this, or at lease not for my exact situation, I've decided to post my resolution in my own blog for whoever might need it. However, the resolution was ultimately gleaned from this other blog.

I have a Server 2003 VM with two virtual hard disks (ignore disk3 as I added that later), I need to increase the disk size of the second disk. This should not have posed any problems. All disks were SCSI and Thin Provision. The second disk is not the OS, nor is it defined to be used for swap space. VMware Tools are installed. There are no snapshots of the VM either. I CAN increase the disk size on other Server 2003 VMs. So, what makes this one different?

To start, here is a screenshot of disk1:



And here is a screenshot of disk2:



Even though disk3 is listed, I added that after the fact. But here is the screenshot of that one and you can see that it can be modified:



I searched the internet for a reason for the differences and couldn't find one. Many mentioned the drive was being used for swap space, others mentioned it would be IDE, and so on. None of that seemed to cover my problem. Until I noticed the drive names. Each of the previous two drives had a -000002 as part of their name, where the third disk simply has _2. I looked at various other VMs that worked fine and noticed that disk1 was ALWAYS the VM name.vmdk and disk2 was ALWAYS the VM name_1.vmdk.

So this suggests something to me about the problem. It is obvious that the disk file isn't correct. A disk migration was attempted and that did not fix it.Then I found the blog that I previously mentioned. In that, post, it referenced the numbers -00001.vmdk as an indicator that there was a snapshot. However, there isn't a snapshot. So, it looks to me that this VM was moved previously (and most likely from one version of VMware to another) while there was a snapshot. I'm guessing that it kept the disk names but consolidated the VM.

My resolution: Make a new snapshot. It will rename the disks to indicate that a snapshot is present. Then I will consolidate the VM to remove the snapshot and hopefully rename the disks appropriately and finally gain access to the Disk Provisioning section. See the screenshots below for proof of the renaming:







As you can see, each has been renamed and they are all unavailable for Disk Provisioning. Now, to consolidate. Consolidation alone won't fix it, you have to delete ALL snapshots which will also consolidate. But once done, you get this:



I can now perform Disk Provisioning as necessary.