Fusion

Hi there,

Have an XP VM which (as the post title says) is almost twice the size of the guest OS hard drive. This is an old converted bootcamp which I've upgraded to fusion 5. I also increased the size of the guest partition to 18GB (from about 10) but the VM is taking up 34GB of space with no viewable snapshots.

Fusion says there is no reclaimable space.

Any ideas on how to get the VM down to closer to the guest OS size?

Thanks in advance.

EDIT: Have attached support info.

Attachment(s)

vm-11-20-12.1240.tgz   5.85 MB 1 version

Check this place:

If the "Reclaimalbe" size is big, try to clean up it first.

Thanks for that. There's no reclaimable space listed there.

It seems something went awry with repartitioning. Repeating the procedure on a backup VM seems to have not done the same thing.

When you check the reclaimable space, is the VM in powered off state?

your logs show that you have 2 VMs - both with vmdks of nominall size of 150 Gb

???

Hi Ulli,

I've attached a new log whch should only show one VM

I think the original problem related to increasing the guest HD partition size then trying to reduce it again.

I've now got an increased parition size which is reflected accurately in VM Fusion and in the Finder in OS X.

I'm not sure why the log is saying 150GB, the VM is a bootcamp import from 3.x which was originally a 320GB drive so should show 299GB like it does in the VM settings.

Please let me know if there's anthing suspect about the new log. The VM seems to be working perfectly now, but having spent a lot of time getting things sorted it'd be a real hassle if something went wrong in the future.

Many thanks,

Alistair

Attachment(s)

vm-11-23-12.23632.tgz   5.74 MB 1 version

Increasing the size of a virtual disk is a two step process, one being increasing the size of the hard disk in the Virtual Machine's Settings and two expanding the existing virtual partition or adding an additional volume.  Have a look at Re: Counterintuitive Instructions from VMWare on Resizing Virtual Disk for a better understanding when dealing with inported Boot Camp partition virtual hard disks.

BTW I do not necessarily suggest you follow the steps in my linked reply and only included it so you have a better understanding of the convoluted nature of the disk layout of the imported Boot Camp partition compared to the layout created during an install using a normal file based Virtual Machine.

My best recommendation is to create a Ghost Image, or similar, or image directly to a right sized virtual hard disk and then swap them out.  This is IMO  and much easier and faster solution to the idiosyncrasies caused by the convoluted importing of the Boot Camp partition.

Thanks, I actually followed your instructions to the letter. I've now got a perfectly sized VM without the unusal bootcamp partitions. I still don't quite understand why I can't decrease the size of the VM hard drive in Fusion settings, but I guess that's just being OCD as it doesn't take up any extra room on the host system.

Attach a screen shot from Disk Management in Windows.

alstsmith wrote: I still don't quite understand why I can't decrease the size of the VM hard drive in Fusion settings

The size of a Virtual Hard Disk cannot be downsized once it has been partitioned.  Only an non-partitioned and empty disk can be downsized using the controls in the Virtual Machine's Hard Disk Settings.