How To Expand (or Contract) a VMWare Fusion Virtual Disk
I use VMWare Fusion exclusively for my .NET programming environment ever since I got my first MacBook a couple years back. I tend to be not so generous when it comes to the disk space that I allocate to my guest OS, so I’ve had to perform the following process to expand my virtual disks quite a few times. The first step is simple enough, in the Settings for the virtual machine, click the Hard Disks option and drag the slider to expand/contract the size virtual disk. The next step is not so simple, but far from difficult.
Download the GParted Live CD disk image from SourceForge and attach it to the virtual machine. To do this, go to the Settings, click the CDs & DVDs option and under “Use disk image”, select the gparted-live-0.4.1-2.iso file that you just downloaded. Be sure to check the “Connected” checkbox at the top of this view so that the virtual machine will recognize it when you start it up.
Unfortunately by default the BIOS will not attempt to boot from the CD, and it’s practically impossible to hit F2 before the guest OS initializes, so the “easiest” way to resolve this is to modify the .vmx file of your virtual disk. To get to this file, right-click on the virtual disk, select “Show Package Contents”, and using TextEdit add the following line to the .vmx file:
bios.forceSetupOnce = “TRUE”
Don’t copy and paste this, because the difference in text format will cause a dictionary error in your virtual disk and it won’t boot up. Fire up the virtual machine and when the BIOS appears, modify the boot order so that the CD has priority and reboot. If everything is working correctly, the GParted Live application should start up.
Just select all of the defaults for the boot, keymap, language and application settings. Odds are that you’ll have trouble with the mouse pointer lining up with the GParted interface, so I just stick to using the keyboard shortcuts. Select the disk partition of the guest OS and click the “Resize/Move” button, change the “New Size (MiB)” field to the desired size, click “Resize/Move”, then click “Apply”. When the resize process completes, shut down the virtual machine.
Go back to the CDs and DVDs section of the Settings for the virtual machine and uncheck the “Connected” checkbox. Now when you login to your guest OS, you’ll be greeted by more (or less) disk space.
