Hard disk space inside VMware Fusion 12

[bkennedy74]

HI all.

Using intel macbook pro 2019. 

I have Vmware fusion 12 runngin and i Have installed big sur on it. 

The virtual machine hard drive size is 500gig, but drive called HD inside the virtual machine is only 80 gig.. How do I attribute the virtual machine drive size to the hard drive inside big sur? 

[Technogeezer]

Let me make sure I understand what you're saying

You have configured a virtual hard drive for your VM with a maximum size of 500 GB (I hope wherever you stored this VM on your Mac has free space of at least 500 GB).

Here's how to figure out what's going on.

By default, virtual disks on Fusion are configured to only consume disk space on your Mac when the VM uses it. If only 80 GB of data is used in the VM, then only about 80 GB of disk is consumed in the file system where you've stored the VM. If you decide to use all of that 500GB virtual disk in your VM, you better make sure you have 500GB+ of space available on the file system that the VM is stored on. More space will be needed if you decide you're going to use snapshots.

This is in contrast to how the Guest OS sees the virtual disk. For a macOS VM, you can see what's going on by:

• Using "Get Info" on the boot disk. That will tell you the capacity and amount used of the virtual boot disk. The capacity figure should be somewhere around 500 GB since that's the max size you've specified for the virtual disk. The Used figure should be somewhere around the 80GB figure.
• If you want some more information, open Disk Utility in the macOS VM. That will show you how your 500GB virtual disk is partitioned and how much is in use. 

[ColoradoMarmot]

Make sure you don't have autoprotect turned on.

[bkennedy74]

thanks for the response. I have done what you suggested and below are teh results. 

Yes I have plenty of room for the 500g. I have 1tb drive which was newly installed with OSX so nothing additional has been added yet. 

The virual drive is 500g

Get Info on teh drive inside the VM (big sur) is 85gig. 
Info from disk utility is also 85gi. 

The reason I need this to be higher than the 80 gig, is because I am trying to restore from time machine backup, with minimal information because I have settings that I didn't know I needed (crypto) that I can't get back unless I load up the backup. 

So my goal is to make the hard drive large enough to restore the time machine backup info and get those settings. But it keeps coming up with 'not enough space' which is what lead me to here.

Bret

[bkennedy74]

Where do I find autoprotect? 

[ravipadigela]

kindly follow the article to increase disk space: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1020778

[ColoradoMarmot]

Ok, it sounds like you increased the disk space in the virtual hardware, but haven't actually resized the drive inside the guest OS.  You can do that by booting into recovery mode in the guest, running disk utility, and then expanding the drive.

Alternatively, you can create a new VM, and then before booting the installer customize the configuration to have a 500GB hard drive.  When the installer runs, it'll use the whole drive.

Make sure you do not preallocate the drive, and do split it into chunks.