You may occasionally find yourself in the situation where your Windows VM has overgrown the size that you created for its disk volume. After all, why wasted valuable ‘Macintosh HD’ space for Windows unnecessarily, right?
Don’t panic… to do so is very easy as long as your have Fusion 2.x (free upgrade if you don’t)! No more need to use the ‘vdiskmanager’ tool. Simply go to the settings for your virtual machine and select the properties for your undersized volume. Then, just drag the slider to the new desired size.
A couple things to be aware of…
- I had problems getting manually entering the size (without using the slider) to work consistently… so, for best results, just use the slider.
- Having enough space to cover the margin for your new drive is not enough! The process of expanding the disk actually builds a new virtual disk file. So, you need to have enough free space for the total size of your new disk for the process to be successful. Afterward, of course you will regain the space of the ‘old’ disk.
Finally, once you have expanded the VHD, you will need to expand your volume in the Guest OS. In Windows, this can be done with the Disk Management services using the ‘Expand Volume’ option.
So, there you have it… allocate space to your Windows machine as needed!
I would like to also note (because I just had a problem with it) that you cannot have any snapshots on the VM in question if you want to expand (or shrink) the disk.
And I just had a problem with this because I deleted all my snapshots and for whatever reason it didn’t finish cleaning up after that… so I was still unable to expand my disk. The workaround that worked for me was to simply create a snapshot with the VM off, then just delete that snapshot. It then completed a cleanup of the snapshots and I was able to expand my disk.
Just FYI. And YMMV.
There is an easier way! You should download and try fatVM http://www.gudgud.com/fatvm
fatVM is a reliable, robust, and safe, 1-click solution for extending the C drive of your VMware Fusion or Workstation virtual disk that is becoming full.
* It provides a simple, intuitive, interface and a reliable process that hides the technical complexity of extending a virtual disk.
* It is robust because it can extend virtual disks having snapshots and clones.
* It is safe because it preserves your original disk, which remains available to you for when the need ever arises.