Topics: Red Hat / Linux, Storage, VMWare

Increasing the VMWare disk drive

If you have any VMWare images, where you made the disk size a little too small, then fortunately in VMWare Workstation you can change the size of a disk with a simple command line program. Sadly the command only makes your drive bigger not the actual partition. And especially Windows won't allow you to resize the partition where the Windows binaries are installed. So how can you get around that?

First, create a copy of your vmdk file to somewhere else, should the next action fail for some reason.

Then resize the disk to the required size:

# vmware-vdiskmanager -x 8GB myDisk.vmdk
You need to have plenty of disk space free to do this operation, as your vmdk file will be copied by vmware-vdiskmanager. BTW, this command may take a while, depending on the size of your vmdk file.

Now get the ISO image of System Rescue CD-ROM and set the VMWare session to boot of the ISO image. Then, run QTParted. You can do this by starting this CD-ROM with a framebuffer (press F2 at start) and then run run_qtparted as soon as Linux has started. Select the windows drive partition with the right mouse button and choose resize. Set the new size and commit the change. Then exit from QTParted and from Linux (init 0). Remove the ISO image from the VMWare session and restart VMWare to normally start Windows. Windows will detect the disk change and force a chk_disk to run. Once Windows has started, the new disk size is present.



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