Shrink hard drive size in Fusion

[TECH198]

How can i shrink hard drive in VMWare Fusion 11?

I accident changed it to pre-allocated 100Gig which filled up my SSD. I managed to shrink the volume n Disk Manager back to 70Gig but Fusion complains "there is not enough space," when i uncheck pre-allocated checkbox.

Resize a Hard Disk

I wish it were that simple... What are my options?

I even thought abut adding another drive -- 30Gig, copying everything to it,  (including all hidden files etc) then reaming the larger drive.

[a_p_]

Changing the disk format will basically clone the entire virtual disk, before it cleans up the existing .vmdk files.

What you may do is to use the vmware-vdiskmanager command line tool to clone the virtual disk - with specifying the desired target format - to another location with sufficient free disk space. To avoid multiple copy/move actions, you may move the VM's existing .vmdk files to another location (e.g. an external disk), and then clone the virtual disk back to the original location.

André

[wila]

Hi,

I managed to shrink the volume n Disk Manager back to 70Gig

You mean Windows disk manager? You cannot make your virtual disk smaller to fit that 70 GB partition.

Making your partition smaller has actually the opposite effect of what you want as there's now 30 GB of disk space that can never be reclaimed by a shrink operation as it has no supported file system on it.

If you do not have an external disk to do what Andre suggested, then you might be able to use VMware vCenter Converter to migrate your VM to a smaller disk. That even allows you to resize your target partition sizes.

Note my usage of "might" as I haven't used it myself in the past few years.

Also note that working with insufficient disk space is dangerous for your VMs and that you risk disk corruption, so I strongly recommend making a manual backup (not Time Machine!) to an external disk before continuing.

--

Wil

[TECH198]

Ya i know,, all it did was shrink the dive of the windows partition, but did nothing obviously to the VMDK file which likes outside of Windows..

My assumption was if i freed more space in the guest, there would be enough space to shrink VMDK,, but the two are totally separate.

[ColoradoMarmot · Accepted solution]

I think that error refers to the host - where there isn't enough space to make a complete copy of the virtual disk.

[Mikero]

Correct, the error is a host-level error. 'Macintosh HD' is what's lacking space in this scenario.