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Expanding A VMWare Client Disk

edit Tim Desjardins 2008-01-20 16:51 UTC 3 comments  ·  ·  ·  ·  ·  ·

I've become a big fan of vmware, but if you undersize a virtual disk and need to expand it on Linux, brace yourself for about an hours worth of work (at minimum.)

Here's the process I eventually followed (this seems way too hard/complicated)

  • BACKUP up your virtual machine!!!
  • expand the virtual disk:
    vmware-vdiskmanager -x 16GB myDisk.vmdk
    
for instance this will size myDisk to 16GB (this size isn't additive it's an absolute size)
  • Now you must boot your virtual machine into DOS or some OS that will recognize your disk, I went the BartPE route and added the vmware scsi driver so it would recognize the scsi disk. I couldn't find the actual scsi driver on the web fotunately I had a copy of the VMWare Converter which contains a copy of the drivers. You can follow the instructions at this site but the driver that is offered is incomplete.
  • Once you've booted BartPE start diskpart and issue the following commands:
    • diskpart> list disk
    • diskpart> list volume
    • diskpart> select volumen=n
    • diskpart> extend
    • diskpart> exit
  • Reboot the virtual machine, restarting Fedora (or your brand of Linux)
  • Start the Linux Volume Manager (lvm)
    • Find the physical volume with lvm> pvscan
    • Resize the physical volume lvm> pvresize /dev/sda?
    • Resize the logical volume lvm>  lvresize -L 14G /dev/VolGroup01/LogVol00
    • lvm> exit
  • Finally resize your filesystem with (on Fedora, other brands of linux may have a different command):
root# resize2fs /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
  • Sheesh, that was a lot of work, the procedure for windows seems slightly easier, but I couldn't find all this information easily in one place for Fedora/Linux, good luck.