Increasing your Windows XP NTFS disk size under VMware Workstation 7
Posted by jpluimers on 2011/02/11
Searching how to increase your Windows XP NTFS partitions of Virtual Machines running under VMware Workstation 7 gets you a truckload of links trying to get you to do all sorts of command-line like vmware-vdiskmanager and such.
That was indeed the case up till VMware Workstation 6.5, but from version 7 on, it has become much easier.
But the links with difficult steps keep appearing at the top of the search queries.
Hence this blog entry: increasing the NTFS partition size in a Windows VM is easy!
The increase is a two step process:
- In VMware Workstation, increase the size of the physical disk
- Increase the NTFS partion on that physical disk
Step 1 has become much easier since VMware Workstation version 7, you can do it from within VMware Workstation now.
Dinesh describes this small process very well in his Expand Disk in VMware Workstation 7 blog post. Step 2 depends on your Windows version, is is really easy or moderate:
- Windows Vista and up (including Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7) it is simple:
you can resize partitions with the built-in Disk Manager (you can run it by starting diskmgmt.msc).
HowToGeek has a nice blog post on doing this: it is really simple! - Windows XP and below (including Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000) require an external tool.
(edit: 20111222): For me, The freeware ExtPart from DELL works best.
I also have good experience with GParted (the free Gnome bootable Partition editor).
A google search reveals a couple of nice video-howtos on how to do this using GParted.
Download the GParted ISO CD-image first.
An HowToGeek article explains a bit more detail the failure situations.
So when I need to do this again, now I have the right links :-)
NB:
If you still want to do it the old-fashioned command-line based way, here is a neat article that describes how.
If you run ESX/ESXi or vShere, this article describes a few ways.
–jeroen
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