I imported my bootcamp partition windows 10 instance into VMWare Fusion 8.1 because I want to start running it virtually, but when I created the original boot camp partition I made it hilariously small (40gb). I need to resize it upward... but... the disc size already reports that it's the entire size of my Mac disk, and it won't let me shrink it from the VMWare interface -- it will only allow me to expand upward.
Instructions say to open the VM itself and expand the partition... but that option is grayed out when I right-click on the drive in windows 10, possibly because it looks like it's seeing the other disks on the mac hard drive (but this is an imported boot camp instance, not running off of boot camp).
I found an article aimed at XP users that suggest deleting the mac partition in the VM but that idea frankly gives me the willies without some more recent guidance.
Any ideas what to try? I am having a devil of a time finding useful docs on the matter...
Thanks for your help!
Hi,
It's not a stupid question.
If you imported the VM as you mentioned then your disk still looks like when it was running under bootcamp.
As a result your virtual disk looks exactly the same as the physical disk layout did before. I'm not sure why the VMware engineers went that route, but my best guess would be that it makes the import/clone to a VM less prone to errors.
I don't have exact steps to make sure that the disk you are running is indeed not a bootcamped partition anymore. If you removed bootcamp from your machine and can still boot the VM then that would be a good indicator that it is indeed an imported VM. Other signs are the size the VM takes on your machine. If running as bootcamp the size is tiny as the VM only has to have meta data pointing to the actual disk.
Before you do anything, make a backup of your VM to an external disk, so that you have something to fall back on.
FWIW other people have had the same issue, here's one example, HDD Size on Bootcamp Conversion to VM but if you search there are more.
--
Wil
Hi,
Easiest for you is probably to use VMware Converter to migrate to a new virtual machine and adjust the disk size before migration.
Personally I would just delete empty mac partitions and resize using something like SystemRescueCD.
--
Wil
If you do manage to succeed, you may well run into an activation issue. Check out this post.
forgive me if this is a stupid question but.... Isn't that mac partition what I'm using to run OSX off of? Or does the virtual machine simply think it's still there because it used to be a bootcamp machine?
Hi,
It's not a stupid question.
If you imported the VM as you mentioned then your disk still looks like when it was running under bootcamp.
As a result your virtual disk looks exactly the same as the physical disk layout did before. I'm not sure why the VMware engineers went that route, but my best guess would be that it makes the import/clone to a VM less prone to errors.
I don't have exact steps to make sure that the disk you are running is indeed not a bootcamped partition anymore. If you removed bootcamp from your machine and can still boot the VM then that would be a good indicator that it is indeed an imported VM. Other signs are the size the VM takes on your machine. If running as bootcamp the size is tiny as the VM only has to have meta data pointing to the actual disk.
Before you do anything, make a backup of your VM to an external disk, so that you have something to fall back on.
FWIW other people have had the same issue, here's one example, HDD Size on Bootcamp Conversion to VM but if you search there are more.
--
Wil
Thanks for the heads-up. I am chasing this issue down now...