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I've got a virtual machine with an 8 gig hard drive in one file. I want to now split virtual hard drive into 2 gig chunks so I can copy the VM onto a FAT32 drive. Is this possible?

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3 Answers

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This can be done using the vmware-vdiskmanager.exe program

Quote from www.luisrocha.net:

  1. For a growable virtual disk, use the following command to split into 2 GB:

vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -r old.vmdk -t 1 new.vmdk or

  1. For a preallocated virtual disk, use the following command to split in 2 GB:

vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -r old.vmdk -t 3 new.vmdk

Also see:

VMWare Server FAQs (Look for "What are the pros and cons of the different disk types"

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This is of course assuming you are using VMware's workstation product. Some of the other products use a utility known as "vmkfstools", but the general concept is the same. – ktower Oct 23 '09 at 15:26
My VMware Server 2 machine also has vmware-vdiskmanager – Josh Oct 23 '09 at 15:34
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Probably the only way to do that would be to download the VMware converter and use that to migrate to a new virtual machine which is configured for 2 Gig files.

It would probably be easier to simply convert the destination hard drive to NTFS.

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This is overkill. You can easily convert an existing disk without creating a whole new virtual machine. – Josh Oct 23 '09 at 15:36
Oh, excellent. Didn't know you could split the disk like that. – mrdenny♦ Oct 23 '09 at 19:14
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Rather than mess with the .vmdk I'd strongly advise you to use RAR or ZIP to compress and split the single file into multiple <2GB files - then expand them at their destination - that way you're not fiddling with the actual VM, just packing it differently for transportation.

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No, I think it now needs to reside on a FAT32 drive -- so he can't expand it on a FAT32 partition because it can't handle files this large. – Josh Oct 23 '09 at 12:30
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