Enlarge vmware image with vmplayer

Question

Is it possible to enlarge an installed (Windows XP) virtual disk partition?

I'm using vmware player (vmplayer) on ubuntu linux. If not, can vmware workstation, or -server do the job?

Answer 1

Yes it's possible. It's a two step process:

1. Use vmware-vdiskmanager (I don't know if Player includes this executable, but WS, Server, and ESX all do). Run it without any command line arguments to see the various options, -x is the one for growing virtual disks, but you might want to make other changes as well. A simple commandline would like this: vmware-vdiskmanager -x 40GB WinXP.vmdk

2. Once you have expanded the disk, you still need to expand the partition and the filesystem. I usually use sysrecuecd for this. Download the iso, setup your VM to boot from the CD, and then you can run gparted to expand both the partition and NTFS filesystem. It will take some time.

Of course, you should backup your virtual disk files before doing this in case anything goes wrong. But, I've both grown and shrunk NTFS formated vmdk files several times without a problem.