Expanding Disk Space in VMware for macOS (APFS Container Resize Error)

[lahmefc]

Hello everyone.

I want to expand the disk space, so I went into VMware settings and expanded disk capacity from 40GB to 80GB. It told me to then handle the partitions for it to take effect inside macOS.

I launched and went to Disk Utility and see this

I cannot resize the blue area for some reason, but I can highlight the "Free Space" area and delete it, which then makes the desired effect happen:

Clicking "Apply" leads to the following error...

Back to square 1. I went into Terminal and brought up diskutil list. Here are the results:

So I want to expand disk0s2, used the following command: $ sudo diskutil apfs resizeContainer /dev/disk0s2 80 (80gb is what I have set in VMware settings)

I also tried $ diskutil apfs resizeContainer disk0s2 0

Both yield the same error:

Any thoughts on what I may be doing wrong or how to successfully add space to the partition?

Time machine is not enabled and there are no local backups to delete, I've run those commands in case (I've seen that as the solution across the web, no go for me)

[ColoradoMarmot · Accepted solution]

This may be a long shot, but can you add even part of the empty space to the partition?

[lahmefc]

Holy smokes you've gotta be joking - it worked! Wow! The amount of time I spent trying to figure out workarounds, almost rebuilt the entire VM. Thank you good sir!

To anyone reading this in the future, the only thing different I did was move from 40gb to 50gb. Operation successful. Moved to 75gb, operation successful. Moved to 80gb. Successful. All done in Disk Utility.

So try adding in smaller pieces at a time. Jumping from 40gb to 80gb in one go did not work.

Can't believe that was the issue! Woohoo! Solved.

[stratician]

Thanks Iahmefc - I had exactly the same problem and you're right, increasing the partition in small amounts worked!. It's so strange who vmware doesn't let you change the partition in the amount. In my case, I made increments of 5Gb at a time.

[tbpoisb]

Hello but ok nice to hear but what command line did you exactly use? I tried both from the org. post , see below ,  but they didn't t work for me.

- $ diskutil apfs resizeContainer disk0s2 10

- $ sudo diskutil apfs resizeContainer /dev/disk0s2 10

these are the ones I tried.

where did I go wrong or did I forget something?  

this is mostly my error:

Error starting APFS Container resize: The chosen size is not valid for the chosen file system (-69850).

tips wanted.

[MacNut21]

This suggestion worked for me.  In Disk Utility go to Partition, then enter a Size that's about 10GB larger (than the current size).  Click Apply, then Continue.  Repeat - until you've repartitioned to the desired larger size.

[HURH]

You are missing the units (G for gigabytes)

sudo diskutil apfs resizeContainer /dev/disk0s2 10G

[wardmw]

Thanks for the response, it got me pointing in the right direction.

For me not number worked, I just got complaints that such-and-such a disk was invalid for this disk, however 0 did it!

$ sudo diskutil apfs resizeContainer disk0s2 0

This resized my VM disk to use the extra space available.

A note for anyone else coming here in search of answers, you need to expand the disk using the VM configuration first, then use the above command to tell the OS to use up the new space.