Cannot shrink my disk to more than half?

[talewis]

I have my virtual in ESXi 4.1.  My virtual has a disk size of 261Gb.  It will only allow me to shrink my disk by 130Gb.

I have pagefile disabled and snapshots disabled.

Is there something else that may be an unmovable file?

Trevor

[vmroyale]

Hello.

Note: Discussion successfully moved from VMware Server 1 to Virtual Machine & Guest OS

Are you referring to the guest OS function to shrink?

Good Luck!

[talewis]

yes, the guest OS.  I'm running W2008 Standard

[vmroyale · Accepted solution]

I believe this is expected behavior. Check out http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2020591

You can always use VMware Converter to resize the virtual disks, but it won't be as efficient as the native shrink function.

[talewis]

Thanks Brian

What I ended up doing was deleting the harddisk from the VM hardware. I then added a hard disk back with the size of my first partition.  In my case 50GB.  Loaded windows.  Then went back to my VM harddisk and increased the provisioned size to 225GB.  After rebooting windows, I could see the unpartitioned space in Disk Management.  I formated this space to give me my second partition of 175GB.

I did the same procedure to get a third partition.