How To Repartition Physical Disk Space In VMware Fusion

vmware fusion icon

Ever since I have been using VMware Fusion, I never really thought about managing the disk space. Primarily because most of my documents and applications were stored on my Mac and not in the virtual machine partition. Therefore, when it did come time for installing applications in VMware, there were installation problems. It takes a little bit of work, but after following these instructions of which my tutorial is based on, you should be all set.

Getting The Tools For The Job

  1. GParted – (download)
  2. VDiskManager GUI – (download)
  3. VMX Extras – (download)

Setting The Max Disk Size

  1. With your Windows XP virtual machine shutdown completely, open up the VDiskManager GUI application.
  2. Click on the Expand tab in VDiskManager. Then click “Choose”.
  3. Go to “username/Library/Virtual Machines/Windows XP/Windows XP.vmdk”
  4. Type in the maximum disk size you want in the box below. Then click “Go”.

Screenshots: 2 3 4

Editing The Startup Screen

  1. You need to edit the startup screen so you can run commands.
  2. To do so, open up the VMX Extras application.
  3. Go to File > Open and browse to “username/Library/Virtual Machines/Windows XP/Windows XP.vmx”
  4. In the Preconfigured Options tab, change the “BIOS Delay” to 5 seconds and then click “Change”.
  5. Close VMX Extras and save the changes.

Screenshots: 3 4

Preparing GParted For Bootup Disk

  1. In order to make the final changes for the repartition, you need to use GParted.
  2. In VMware Fusion, go to the Virtual Machine > Settings menu (⌘ (Command) + E) and choose CDs & DVDs.
  3. Under the CDs & DVDs menu, choose “Use disk image” and select the “GParted.iso” file.
  4. Startup the Windows virtual machine in VMware Fusion now and hold down F2.

Screenshots: 3 4

Using The BIOS Startup Screen

  1. After holding down F2, you should see the Main BIOS screen.
  2. Hit the right arrow key until you are in the Boot tab.
  3. Now use the “-” and “+” to manipulate the order of devices until “CD-ROM Drive” is on the top of the list.
  4. Now hit the ⌘ (Command) key and F10 to save the configuration.

Screenshots: 3 4

Using The GParted Startup Screen

  1. After saving your configuration, you will see the GParted intro screen.
  2. Choose the first option, “GParted Live” (Default settings).
  3. In the next pop-up screen, choose “Don’t touch keymap” and hit Return.
  4. Hit Return when asked  “Which language do you prefer?” (English is default).
  5. Hit Return when asked “Which mode do you prefer?”.
  6. In the GParted screen that appears, use your arrow keys (because the mouse does not always work) and arrow over to “Resize/Move”.
  7. Now drag the slider with your mouse (if it does not work with your mouse, enter numbers for the boxes). Then hit Tab until the “Resize/Move” button is selected below.
  8. Now hit Tab once until the Undo button is selected, then arrow over to the right and select Apply and hit Return.
  9. In the small pop-up window hit Tab until Apply is selected, then hit Return to apply the drive size changes.
  10. You should see a window that shows the current status.
  11. After it is done, close the window and close GParted by hovering your mouse over the Exit button and then click it when you see the black hand.
  12. Now use your down arrow keys and choose Shutdown and hit Return.
  13. As it shuts down you may receive a message window, choose Yes and hit Return to finish the shutdown.
  14. If Windows starts up by accident, just shut it down from the main screen.

Screenshots: 2 3 7 9 10 12 13

Final Touches Before Using Newly Repartitioned Virtual Disk

  1. Go to the Settings menu in VMware Fusion after making sure the virtual machine is shut down.
  2. Under the CDs & DVDs settings, change it so it says “Automatically detect physical CD/DVD drive”.
  3. With your virtual machine off, go to VMX Extras and open the “username/Library/Virtual Machines/Windows XP/Windows XP.vmx” file.
  4. Go to the Preconfigured Options tab and change the BIOS Delay back to the default which is “No Bios Delay”.
  5. Boot up Windows, it may do a disk check if necessary and may require you to restart after it fully boots.
  6. Double check that your hard drive disk space has increased (My Computer > Local Disk (C:) > Right-click > Properties).

Screenshots: 1 2 3 4 6

19 Responses to “How To Repartition Physical Disk Space In VMware Fusion”

  1. Alex Says:

    March 4th, 2009 at 6:37 pm

    Great instructions, thanks! Not sure if this is a foolish question, but can I use the similar procedure to make my virtual machine partition SMALLER? Just about every piece of info I can find online is about how to grow it. I used to use it for GIS software, but now I rarely use it at all and would like to reclaim the hard drive space to facilitate burning DVDs in Mac OS X.

  2. Mason Sklut Says:

    March 4th, 2009 at 7:27 pm

    Alex, it should work just fine. You follow the same steps, but just change the partition to the appropriate size you want. Let me know if there are any problems.

  3. Olli Says:

    May 8th, 2009 at 12:36 am

    Thanks for this tutorial. I was looking for something like this but didn’t find any, and I can see you have put some time to it.
    One problem I met though. When I tried to change the max disk size with VDiskManager, it didn’t show any information or warnings. This was because of the “snapshot-chain”. I realized this problem from trial and error. In Terminal, I discovered this because it shows the status. After I deleted all the snapshots in VMware Fusion, it worked fine.

  4. Chuck de Young Says:

    July 27th, 2009 at 12:50 pm

    If doing this on a MacBook Air make sure the CD/ROM drive is “Connected”. It probably will default to disconnected. The boot to GPartEd Live will not happen if the connected property is not set.

  5. Mason Sklut Says:

    July 31st, 2009 at 5:21 am

    Chuck, I appreciate you pointing that out.

    Thanks,
    Mason

  6. Paul Pogonoski Says:

    August 2nd, 2009 at 3:51 am

    This has been plaguing me for months, and I’ve finally found the solution!

    Great instructions, but the clincher was the hitherto unknown VMWare utilities (less GParted which is an old Linux friend) that has made some thing that I couldn’t get working, work.

    Great work!

  7. Richard Ladson Says:

    August 3rd, 2009 at 9:01 am

    Thanks for sharing your expertise.

    I wish to shrink (not expand) the size of the partition allocated to Win/XP, however, the VDiskManager GUI insists that the new partition size be larger than the existing size.

    Therefore, it appears that one cannot shrink the partition size, am I wrong?

    Thanks.

  8. Mason Sklut Says:

    August 3rd, 2009 at 3:52 pm

    You’re very welcome Paul. Glad you got everything working now.

    Thanks,
    Mason

  9. Mason Sklut Says:

    August 3rd, 2009 at 3:54 pm

    Hey Richard,
    I actually had no problem shrinking the XP partition on my computer. In fact, you don’t do the actual shrinking until the GParted screen (during BIOS reboot).
    Just follow the screenshots I have during the GParted steps and drag the partition slider the other way to shrink it.

    Thanks,
    Mason

  10. Tore G Says:

    August 13th, 2009 at 9:47 am

    Thanks a lot! Really useful. I thought that VMWare Fusion could handle this on it’s own. This guide helped out.

  11. Mason Sklut Says:

    August 14th, 2009 at 6:04 pm

    You’re very welcome. I appreciate the comment.

  12. CJRH Says:

    February 11th, 2010 at 3:19 pm

    I followed the steps up to hitting “apply” in GParted. It gave me an error when I tried to shrink the disk. Reading online, I found that the error might be solved by a simple defrag of the drive. I went to perform my defrag and somehow it’s eating up my available Mac hard drive space. I keep having to delete files just to create room for the defragmentation to finish. What it’s acting like is that somehow it’s ignoring the original NTFS partition and creating a new one. What do I do? HELP!

  13. Mason Sklut Says:

    February 11th, 2010 at 8:17 pm

    Assuming you have not partitioned anything successfully, your best bet is try again.
    Let me know how it goes.

    Thanks,
    Mason

  14. CJRH Says:

    February 13th, 2010 at 3:09 pm

    I actually just deleted all of my .vmdk files and called it good. It was become more of a hassle than it was worth. Bye bye Windows XP.

    Thanks for the help, Mason.

  15. Mason Sklut Says:

    February 13th, 2010 at 4:34 pm

    CJ,
    I’m sorry I was not much help. Typically, errors can be fixed by re-doing or re-moving. I’m glad you found a fix though.
    “Bye bye Windows XP” is a statement I would like to hear more often :-)

    Thanks,
    Mason

  16. Justin Says:

    May 17th, 2010 at 7:45 pm

    When I reboot XP and hold down F2 the only thing that happens is my brightness goes all the way up.

  17. Mason Sklut Says:

    May 18th, 2010 at 10:22 am

    Justin, have you tried holding down Function (Fn) when you press F2?

    Let me know if that works,
    Mason

  18. Ken Williams Says:

    June 3rd, 2010 at 5:56 pm

    Wow, many thanks for this. I’ve been trying to permanently shrink my Virtual Disk even since I mistakenly allocated 70 GB to it when migrating from Boot Camp. Like one of your previous writers, all I could find were instructions to make it bigger! It’s now 35 GB and I won’t have to buy a new drive! Cheers!

  19. Mason Sklut Says:

    June 6th, 2010 at 11:37 am

    Thanks Ken. I’m glad you found my tutorial helpful.

    - Mason

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