VMWare: Expand your Virtual Disk size

If you find you’re running out of space in your virtual disk with VMWare, here’s how to increase the size of it:

Prerequisites:

  • Virtual Machine must NOT be running.
  • You must NOT have the virtual disk mounted as a drive letter on the host.
  • You must not have any snapshots of your VM.
  • You should back up your VM!!!!

Here’s how:

  1. In one of these paths (depending on whether you’ve got a 64 bit host or a 32bit host):
    1. C:Program Files (x86)VMwareVMware Workstation
    2. C:Program FilesVMwareVMware Workstation
    3. There’s an executable:  vmware-vdiskmanager.exe
  2. Open a command prompt (a.k.a. “DOS Box”) and CD to the folder that contains the file: vmware-vdiskmanager.exe.
  3. Type this command (all on one line):

      vmware-vdiskmanager.exe –x 30GB “c:My VM FolderMyVirtualDisk.vmdk

      Don’t forget the quotes!

      “-x” (no quotes) tells it to resize the virtual disk.

      “30GB” tells it to resize it to 30GB.  Replace that number with the new size you want.  You can specify sizes in KB, MB, or GB.

  4. Start up your VM.
  5. Once inside your booted VM, use your guest OS’s partition utilities to use the extra space.
  6. You may need to reboot your VM.

Here’s a video demonstrating how to tell the VM to use the larger size (using Vista as the Guest OS).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zZeb7ccer8]

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