I am trying to add a hard disk to a VM guest on a host running ESXi 4.1.0 standard. This is a historical system that we need to keep and maintain for another 1 & 1/2 year. There are 15 guest on this host. The local data store has 1.63 TB of storage with 868.85 GB free. All guest use thick provisioning.
The guest I am working with is a Windows 2003 R2, 32 bit, Standard Edition, Service Pack 2. I currently have two disks C: = 80 GB & E: = 20 GB. I am trying to add a third hard drive of 300 GBs. When I try to add the 300 GB drive I get the following error message. "The disk capacity was not properly formatted or was out of range. It has been replaced with the nearest acceptable value." The value it is changed to is 256 GB.
I have used the same Windows OS to create three other similar servers with larger hard drive C: = 100GB, E: = 100GB, & F:=1.5 TB. Microsoft's web site says this OS can handle 2 TB of storage. The only difference with the other three host is they are running vSphere 5.5.