Disk space maxed out, can't boot VM or make room on disk...now what???

[bmessing]

I'm using Fusion 2.0, Mac OSX 10.5.5

I can't boot the VM because there isn't enough disk space. I get the error "VMware Fusion has paused this virtual machine because the disk on which the virtual machine is stored is almost full."

I can't find much of anything to delete because all available disk space is taken up by OSX and the .vmdk files. My hard drive is about 111GB, of which almost 100 is the virtual machine. I only have about 40GB of actual files, the rest is an accumulation of half a dozen interdependent snapshots that came from who knows where (screenshot attached). I came across a knowledge base article to the effect that unless deleted, snapshots will just keep growing in size until they consume all available disk space. That seems to be what's happened here.

I have tried all night to free up a little space here and there by deleting unused files and apps. I have gotten VMWare to start briefly but can't accomplish much before temp files chew up the space and I get the same error.

I am unable to free up disk space using VMWare Disk Cleanup because "These settings cannot be changed while the virtual machine has a snapshot." No snapshots are displayed and I can't create a new one to achieve a consolidation because there is no disk space on which to put it.So I have 2 questions:

1. Can I add space for a new snapshot on a separate physical drive? I see no instruction on how to do that. I can plug in a portable USB drive ... can I somehow put the new snapshot on there to provoke the consolidation? Can VMWare see disk space on two different physical drives and treat it as one VM? If so how do I do that?

2. If no, let's say I copy the entire VM directory off to a portable hard drive. Then what? Can I boot the VM off that drive somehow, and use that disk space to create the new snapshot? Or do I have to find some new machine with Mac OSX and a bigger hard drive and launch the VM there? Will it just, like, work if I copy the VM from one machine to another like that?

How do ever get this thing to boot again?????? (yes, it's a crisis)

Thanks for any insights here.

Bill

[admin · Accepted solution]

Your second option is probably the easiest. Most USB thumb drives aren't going to be big enough to help you out of your predicament.

Grab an external USB hard drive large enough for the VM to fit with some room to spare for temporary files and the duplicates that are created while cleaning up snapshots. Copy the VM up to it and then open it from there. You don't need to power on a VM to clean up snapshots but you do need enough space to consolidate the image. You can clean up the snapshots and then move the whole deal back to your main disk if you want.

It's probably not a bad idea to have a backup of the entire VM anyway if it's got anything important on it. The snapshops only help you protect the guest from changes made inside the guest ("oops, I just deleted that directory" issues), they don't do anything if your physical hard drive decides to drag a head across the platter ;).

[bmessing]

Thanks...waiting for all my files to copy over to the portable drive. Meantime three really dumb questions:

Dumb: Can I start the VM on the portable drive while connected to my original Mac? Or will the original VM on the Mac and the VM on the portable interfere with/corrupt one another?

Dumber: If I connect the portable drive to another machine and start vmware, does that machine have to be a Mac if my original machine is a Mac and my VM is a Fusion VM? Not sure if the vmware app is cross-platform or if it will work at all in a PC environment.

Dumbest: I actually don't see anything in the directory to click to open the VM except perhaps the .vmx file. Do I need to get VMWare installed on the second machine for this to work or are the VMWare bits included in the VM once I've copied it to the portable drive?

Thanks!

Bill

[admin]

There are no dumb questions, only dumb answers

1. Yes, a VM, from the host filesystem point of view, is just a bunch of files, you can open it from the external drive. When you do, it'll ask you if you moved or copied it. If you plan on moving it back to the main hard drive, answer "moved" otherwise answer "copied".

2. One of the big advantages of a VMware VM is that it's portable. You can create a VM on a mac, move it to a Linux box and run it under VMware Player without the guest even knowing. Heck, you can suspend it on the mac and start it back up on the linux machine in most cases. That said, Fusion as a product isn't cross platform, if you want to bring the VM up elsewhere, you'll need a different VMware product on those machines. VMware Player is free for both Windows and Linux and can start and run VMs.

3.If the VM is a bundle (i.e. it's a directory named (vmname).vmwarevm then you can just open the bundle in fusion and it'll go. Otherwise you'll need to open the .vmx file in the vm directory. The VMware bits are something you'll definitely need to install on the other machine. Again, VMware player are free for both Windows and Linux. The VM folder includes only stuff needed for the guest (disk image, configuration file and a couple other things).

Hope that answers your questions.

[bmessing]

Thank you Alex, this worked flawlessly once I got the right portable drive. Originally I was using a portable drive formatted as FAT32 (which I didn't realize) and it was choking on the large filesizes and large filenames. Once I got a Mac-formatted drive with a firewire connection it all worked flawlessly, exactly as you describe.

My biggest regret is that Fusion/VMWare doesn't warn you before suspending. You're suddenly paralyzed and in my case I wound up carving chunks out of the Mac OS to free up disk space (since deleting files out of the VM has no effect until you consolidate). Nevertheless I'm thrilled that I was able to recover my files.

BTW I didn't recover as much disk space as I thought would. In the VM, Windows shows disk utilization of 39GB but the sole .vmdk is for some reason 65GB. The VM partition is 75GB so I don't know how to account for this. I am not going to worry about it however!

[admin]

BTW I didn't recover as much disk space as I thought would. In the VM, Windows shows disk utilization of 39GB but the sole .vmdk is for some reason 65GB. The VM partition is 75GB so I don't know how to account for this.

Sounds like you're using a sparse disk, which is the default. You can recover unused space by running the Tools shrink process. In order to do this you can't have any snapshots. I think you'll also need free disk space potentially up to the maximum size of the virtual disk (e.g. another 10 GB in your case), though as I write this that doesn't quite make sense so I might be making this part up.