VmWare Primary HDD Expansion

Question

I have a VmWare virtual machine that is coming dangerously close to it's primarry HDD's limit and I need to extend it. How do I do this? I'm working with VmWare Workstation 6.0.5

Answer 1

This link gives two approaches that should help.

It looks like this is the most straightforward method:

vmware-vdiskmanager -x 12GB path\to\disk.vmdk

where 12GB is the desired size of the expanded volume.

Answer 2

I don't know about 6.0.5, but in former versions there used to be a program called vmware-vdiskmanager in VMWare's program directory. You can use this one to extend the virtual disk container.

After you expanded the container, you need to expand the partitions in the guest, you have to do this from "the inside", which depends on the OS you are using on the guest and the filesystem. I often use an Ubuntu Life-CD or a System-Rescue-CD ISO together with qtparted to expand the partitions as needed.n

Answer 3

Simplest way for me worked yesterday. My colleague advice me.

1. Turn of your primary virtual machine, where your primary HDD is attached(if it is running).
2. Expand your disk in primary virtual machine preferences. (Right click Settings, right click your primary hard disk, choose utilities, expand, ...)
3. Attach your primary disk to another virtual machine. Boot another virtual machine. If you go to disk manager, you can see, that your disk is bigger then partition, resize it. Now it will work, because you are on different other virtual machine and you your expanding disk is not the from which you booted the system, so you can resize the disk in disk manager(win GUI).
4. Detach your primary disk from other virtual machine.
5. Boot up your primary system, your primary partition is bigger.

Trick is you can not change size of partition, from which Windows booted, so you must attach it to another system, resize it, and it is all.

Answer 4

Assuming this is under Windows, there is a program usually in "C:\Program Files\VMWare\VMware Workstation\" called vmware-vdiskmanager.exe that you can use to do this. Open a DOS prompt and CD to that directory. The command to expand the drive is:

vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -x 50Gb NameOfDisk.vmdk

Also, this isn't the only thing you can do with this command. If you just type the command w/o any parameters you will see a bunch of the other available options.

Answer 5

I've sometimes had problems when using the vmware-vdiskmanager application (it created the extra space, but I couldn't use it). At which point, I used the GParted live CD, which worked perfectly.