resizing a vmware fusion disk image

Tue, Oct 23, 2007

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A few days ago I recreated my WinXP vmware image on my mac. Under windows, growing vmware disk images isn't much trouble (from what I remember). There didn't seem to be any tools available for fusion. Windows XP with Office, Visual Studio 2k3 and 2k5 takes up a good bit of space. Not to mention sql server 2k5 and the associated msdn libraries. So I hit the limit, and was going nowhere fast regarding options.

Until I poked around /Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/MacOS/ and found diskTool. Disktool allows you to grow or maintain a vmware disk image (vmdk).

(segfault@megumi)(13:57)% /Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/MacOS/diskTool 
VMware disk tool.
Usage: /Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/MacOS/diskTool OPTIONS diskName
 Options: 
    ...snip...
   -X                 : grow disk
    ...snip...

I have no idea what capacity's units are. For some reason this made me think of the physics classes I've been in, I could just see some professor lecturing about missing units. I used 25Gb and it worked, so I assume that the Mb, Gb and Tb units are valid. Hope this helps someone.