Downsizing a VMWare drive

[avieth]

I want to make my virtual disk used by vmware smaller. Right now it's 10gb (split into 2gb files) but I'd like it to be 5gb. How do I do this without having to re-install windows?

[Cybersorcerer]

Hi,

it is possible using vmwares vdiskmanager, however only if your vmware workstation runs on a windows host. On Linux hosts i am not aware
of a way doing this. More Information can be found at the following links

http://www.vmware.com/support/ws55/doc/ws_disk_manager_shrinking.html
http://www.vmware.com/support/ws55/doc/ws_disk_shrink.html
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Cybersorcerer
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Too old to die young

Dell Precision M90, Intel Centrino Duo T2700 @ 2.33GHz running Jackass! 2006.2

[zoomie66]

I did exactly what you're planning on doing. I originally allocated 10GB to the guest OS, but after running it a while, I found that it was overkill and wanted to reduce the size to 5GB. The following may not be the most elegant solution, but it worked quite well for me.

1. Create a backup of your .vmx file. i.e. "cp WinXP.vmx WinXP.vmx.old"

2. Create a new virtual hard drive and partition that new hard drive within the Windows guest OS (on my system, the original hard drive was IDE 0:0 and the new, smaller drive was IDE 1:0). Remember to set the new partition to "active" with the partition software you use, else the new drive will not boot. The disk images you create will have a file extension of .vmdk...and by default, vmware breaks up large hard drives into 2GB chunks. i.e. WinXP.vmdk, WinXP-s001.vmdk, WinXP-s002.vmdk, etc.

3. Within the guest OS, use Norton Ghost to copy the image of the original Windows installation to the new virtual hard drive partition. Then shutdown the guest OS.

4. In VMware settings, I removed IDE 0:0 ( the original drive) and changed the IDE setting of the new drive from IDE 1:0 to IDE 0:0. Its safe to do, as it doesn't physically delete the .vmdk files.

5. Restart the guest OS. If everything is working, then its safe to permanently delete the .vmdk files associated with the original hard drive. If it doesn't work, simply rename the .vmx backup to the original name and you're back to where you started because you didn't delete anything.

This solution works quite well, provided that you have enough hard drive space to create a second virtual drive temporarily.
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