Try Fn-F2 instead - some Mac keyboards have the function keys not really function keys by default.


The original method in the PDF recommends using a free, open-source live CD to change the partition - no extra XP/Vista necessary. Other people pointed out that if you have an extra XP/Vista VM, this is another option.

Are you sure the guest had focus and you pressed it fast enough?


If you want to get into the BIOS, an alternative to pressing F2 is to add the following line to the .vmx (usual caveats: do this while the VM is powered off and Fusion doesn't have the VM open):

bios.forceSetupOnce = "TRUE"

damax99 wrote:
This may be preferable given other users have had problems with gparted cds on GPT-formatted volumes that may or may not be fixable using fixboot after expanding a logical partition containing Vista.

In addition to running iPartition, I assume it relocates the logical filesystem (if say it were at the end of the physical disk) so the free space is at the end of partition. You would need a bootable disk to expand the FAT32/NTFS file system to take advantage of the new space. This is all outside of Fusion's scope.

Fusion creates a raw disk mapping that includes the geometry of the logical partition the Boot Camp OS resides in. This virtual disk will be invalided or worse become an inaccurate representation of the Boot Camp partition size. You can either re-create the raw disk mapping (using vmware-rawdiskCreator) or delete the entire Boot Camp partition meta files which forces Fusion to re-create all the meta information about your Boot Camp partition.

Sorry vmware-vdiskmanager doesn't support reducing the disk capacity only expanding it. For dynamically allocating disks it's enough to cap the OS partition at the smaller size and not worry about the virtual disk capacity. No such luck for pre-allocated disks. vmkfstools in ESX Server can reduce VMDK sizes but not vmware-vdiskmanager. Depending on what tools you own you can create a new 30 GB blank disk, then use Ghost or Acronis to do a virtual disk-to-virtual disk transfer from your 50 GB to a 30 GB dynamically allocating disk, saving you some temporary disk space. Delete the 50 GB pre-allocated, then convert the allocated portion of the 30 GB virtual disk to pre-allocated. Finally you would defrag the 30 GB pre-allocated disk on the host.

If you don't own a commercial disk imaging tool, you can download a Linux livecd product and use dd to move your data between your two virtual disks. Maybe gparted can do this, I have not checked.

The overall context of this thread is not so much about shrinking a sparse disk, which is what your post and URL is about, but changing the physical capacity of a virtual disk. Which are two entirely different concepts.

Quick question. I need to make my hard drive larger and Ghost sounds great. I have XP Pro already, so I don't need to upgrade. I cannot find my XP disk anymore. Will I still be able to do what you stated?

I must be missing something. It can't really be this difficult to add space to a VMWare Virtual Machine, can it?

Wasn't there some setting in the install that let me choose if I wanted a fixed size drive, or one that could expand? Is this really the complicated process we need in order to expand?

I was expecting something in the Virtual Machine setting that let me increase disk size, not a bunch of command line utilites and copying my entire installation to a new disk.

Did I just misinterpret what you're saying, or is it really this difficult?