Kent J. Chen's WebLog

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Resizing the VMWare Virtual Disk

Everyone who loves to use Virtualization platform would have the same question how we could do that if our virtual disk is running out of the space.? I just created the new host on VMWare Server to test the new Vista RC1 that just came out recently.? And found out I set the disk size too small so that only very little space that I can use after everything was installed.? I didn't want to reinstall it all over again and thought it has to be a way of doing it easily.? Thanks to VMWare who thought about this ahead of time, and provided a tool in its Server version to accomplish it.?

The tool is called vmware-vdiskmanager.exe which not only support expanding the virtual disk but do other stuff as well, i.e. defragment, shrink, create, etc.???First of all, I ran the following command in?the MS-Dos Prompt window to resize my Vista virtual disk to 30G.

vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -x 30Gb “windows vista.vmdk“

Because?of?VMware Virtual Disk Manager Does Not Expand Partitions, I have to run either Partition Magic or Windows DiskPart utility (diskpart.exe) to get my already loaded partition resized.? Wait...because?this is Vista which makes my life much easier, I don't need those tools anymore, all I need to do is opening the disk management from Computer Management console, right click the partition I want to expand and click “Extend Volume”.? Once I finished the short Extend Wizard, my main Vista partition now is extended to the new virtual disk size.

Print | posted on Thursday, September 21, 2006 4:47 PM |

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