Made my VM partition too big, please help

[Fogliano]

Hello Everybody,

I am running Windows 7 on VMWare Fusion and apparently I have made my vmdk to big.  The VM frequently locks up and I have to reclaim space to make the VM work again.  I have shrunk the volume in the Windows VM disk utility but is there a way to shrink the vmdk so it is not taking up so much of the physical hard drive.  The slide bar in the VMWare library settings does not move.  This is the only thing that I can think is causing the lock ups.  I have tried to use converter but you can't download it on a MAC and I cannot communicate to the VM from another computer in the same subnet.  Does anyone have any thoughts on this, any methods that may help outside or rebuilding the VM?  Thanks so much everyone.

Brandon

[continuum]

So you already resized the partitions from inside the guest ?
Do you have one or  two partitions inside the guest ?
Anyway - create new vmdk just large enough to contain the resized partitions.
Do not format the new vmdk.
Boot into a Linux-LiveCD.
You should now find one disk /dev/sda with the original installation and another blank disk /dev/sdb.
Check the size required for the partitions in the original. Get the size in Mbs and add some space at the end so that you have a value that is devidable by 8. Assume this is X.
Then launch a terminal as root and run the command
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=1M count=X conv=notrunc
This will take a while.
Once it is done reboot the Linux LiveCD and launch gparted or gdisk.
Both have a tool to fix the partitiontable (required if your VMs used a GPT-table.
Once that is done - reconfigure the VM so that the newly created vmdk is the only one connected.
Now boot into Windows again - if everything worked you can then delete the original large vmdk.

[wila]

Hi,

Shrinking the partition within the virtual disk has not the desired effect, in fact it means that the "clean up" function within vmware can no longer reclaim disk space as it can only reclaim disk space from supported file systems such as NTFS.

So the first step would be to undo that partition resize.

Then you are correct in that you cannot resize the virtual disk in Fusion to something smaller. There are ways to do that via other means, but perhaps it isn't needed.

Since your writing suggests that you are short on disk space, my first recommendation would be to make a backup to an external disk of the VM with the VM shut down (not suspended) before trying to reclaim disk space.

Then after the backup, with the VM shut down still

Go to the Fusion menu -> Virtual Machine -> Settings -> General

There's a button there "Clean up Virtual Machine"

This allows you to reclaim back any space used within the virtual machine of files that have been deleted and gives that space back to the host system.

Also note that if you have snapshots open or are using the auto protect feature that those also can use quite a bit of disk space at the host system and that the clean up works most effective (as in reclaims most disk space) with all snapshots committed and auto protect set to off.

Any disk space not  used should then be reclaimed and give just as much space back to the host as a fully resized virtual disk could possibly do.

The only disadvantage over a resized smaller virtual disk is that it can grow out of proportions again.

Hope this helps,

--

Wil

[Fogliano]

Thanks Wil,

I have done that many times, that is the problem this has to be done every 2 to 3 days or the VM locks up and now all of the lock ups are causing driver issues an and boot problems.  Any thoughts?

[Fogliano]

Continuum,

Yes I shrunk the partition inside of Windows already.  Inside the guest just one partition which is Windows.

[a_p_]

Please use the "Collect Support Information" command from the VMware Fusion (menu bar) > Help > Collect Support Information and then attach the .zip file it created on your Desktop to a reply post. In case this file is too large, post a complete list of files in the VM's .vmwarevm package (including sizes).

André

[Fogliano]

Sorry this took so long here are the files, how do I attach the support info, I don't see a button for?

[wila]

Hi,

oh and in case you did find that option, but not the attach button in the reply window.

Please have a look in the bottom right corner of the reply window, it has a link called "Attach".

Not the most obvious spot to look for it.

Hope this helps,

--

Wil

[Fogliano]

Wil thanks for helping out, here is a screen shot of my reply box, I don't see an attachment button, sorry if I am missing something blatantly obvious.

[wila]

No need to say sorry, I completely understand as it is everything, but obvious.

It happens all the time that people overlook that button.

I will ask again at the forum development team if they can relocate that to a normal position, like in the toolbar.

edit: I had not zoomed in on your image (but have now) .. huh? There really is no attach link. What browser are you using? Looks like firefox to me.

--

Wil

[dariusd]

Ah, you're viewing your forum inbox and using the reply function built into the inbox.  The inbox reply widget is a bit minimal and doesn't have support for attachments and so forth.

Instead, while you're viewing the discussion thread in your inbox, click on the blue thread title that appears just below the "Back to Inbox" link.  That will take you to the discussion thread on its own page.  From there, click on the blue Reply link in the post to which you want to reply, and then you will have the full-featured editor/composer and should have the Attach link in the lower-right.

Cheers,

--

Darius

[Fogliano]

Awesome, thanks that helped.  Here is the support information from the VMware Fusion instance as of last week.