Upgrading your HDD in VMware Fusion
Thursday, 18 September 2008 – 14:19A few month ago I started to test running virtual machines on my MacBook. Lotus Designer still needs Windows so after trying Parallells solution I stuck with VMware Fusion as it did seem more stable at the moment. So far it has been working brilliant and I’m running Windows 2003 Server as guest OS as it consumes a lot less resources than Vista…
As always I started out with a too small harddrive. I installed 2003 Server, Lotus Notes and Designer plus a few other nice applications on a 5 GB drive. Now I’ve been at the very limit of this for a few weeks and needed to expand it.
VMware Fusion 1.x did seem to lack the option to expand the drive but after the upgrade to 2.0 a couple of days ago the option was there! Simply state the new size and press Apply!
After that you need to expand the partition size from within your Windows installation. There is no built in tool for this so I downloaded a GParted Live CD, burned a disk and booted it in my virtual machine. I needed to set the boot sequence by pressing F2 at startup to make ti boot from the CD.
GParted is then very simple, select your partition, state the new size and apply. Finished! Remove CD and reboot back in Windows and you got a lot more disk space at hand again!
2 Responses to “Upgrading your HDD in VMware Fusion”
Doesn’t Windows Server 2003 include partition resize tools in their built in disk management by default? I know that Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 do…
See article on resizing Partitions on Vista with built-in tools and XP with a number of tools at:
http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-7471
Glad you like the disk resize functionality!
Pat
By Pat Lee on Sep 18, 2008
Thanks for the tips!
I did find diskpart (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb735137.aspx) but for some reason this didn’t work on my disk. It gave a lot of error messages…
Disk resize saved my day…
By Johan on Sep 19, 2008