Increase disk size of vmware 6.5 XP install?

Question

Is there a simple means to increase the size of a virtual disk for an XP install using vmware workstation 6.5? We need to increase from the 20GB it is now set at since it is nearly filled.

Answer 1

I like to use the GParted live cd to copy the existing data to a new larger virtual disk. These instructions should work.

Answer 2

From here:

Q: How do I increase the size of virtual disks in either VMware Workstation or VMware GSX Server?

A: By using Norton Ghost to increase the virtual disk size.

Solution To increase the disk size of the virtual machine, you need to have Norton Ghost or a Norton Ghost bootable floppy disk or image and sufficient disk space. Here's how it's done:

1. Power off the virtual machine.
2. Add a new HDD to the virtual machine with the new size that you need to expand to. (Note: the new HDD {Virtual device node - ide/scsi} type should be configured same as source HDD)
3. Create a Norton Ghost dos boot floppy, by clicking on: Ghost utilities > Norton ghost boot wizard > standard ghost boot disk
4. Power on the virtual machine and boot using the newly created ghost boot disk.
5. When the virtual machine boots and starts the Ghost application, select the Local disk-to-disk option.
6. Select the first drive (the existing smaller HDD) as the source disk and second drive (the newly added bigger HDD) as destination disk.
7. Ghost will now transfer your existing data to the new HDD that you have defined.
8. Power off the virtual machine when Ghost completes its process of copying, and remove the floppy disk from the floppy drive.
9. Now using the VMware Configuration Editor, remove the smaller HDD and power on the virtual machine.

The above steps can be used for increasing disk sizes of SCSI to SCSI and ide to ide HDD. Remember that your old smaller HDD disk file still exists in the host machine, and it may need to be deleted manually.

Answer 3

This is how u do it but it is very risky.

Answer 4

When you created the VM there is an option to create a fixed-size image or a dynamically expanding image. Always select dynamically expanding if you think you might need more space as you can avoid these problems. But don't worry there are a few solutions.

1.) Use the VM "clone" utility that has been bundled since VMWare 5. Instructions found here.

2.) Use something like Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image to image your current machine. Copy the images to an external hard drive. Create a new (bigger) virtual machine, and restore the images to it.

Answer 5

The checked answer is the wrong answer on this question. VMWare Player 3.0, in the virtual machine properties, gives you the ability to defragment, shrink, AND expand a disk from the already provided tools. You wouldn't therefore need the difficulty of GPartedD or CloneZilla.

Answer 6

use clonezilla

1. edit the settings for your vm
2. add a new virtual disk the size you want
3. set the cdrom of the vm to the clonezilla boot cd
4. use clonezilla to do a local clone from one disk to another, resizing the image to fit the new drive
5. delete the old virtual disk from your vm and make sure the new one is set to master (not slave, which it'll probably be)

update: I tried it and somehow windows didn't notice the change and update the filesystem, so it still thought it was 8 gig, not 80. I ran the gpartd live cd and poked the partition (there was 100 mg free on the disk). booting windows again yielded a filesystem check and now the correct, new size of 80 gig.

Answer 7

VMware Workstation 7.0 later version, you can expand disk size with GUI. But before, you have to increase disk size by vdiskmanager command. This instruction may help guys who want to increase disk size in VMware: http://www.partition-magic.org/vmware/increase-disk-size-vmware.html