While you’re on the phone with Microsoft, you can buy a second copy of vista for your new “backup” VM. Depending on how severe Vista thinks this change is, you may be in for a call to Microsoft to re-activate Vista. Vista now boots up just fine with the bigger hard drive. Reboot the VM, unlink the Vista ISO or remove the DVD. That is after all my purpose.“ I never even needed to bust out “fixboot” and “fixmbr” from the repair console. As Vista’s setup repair was loading, it noticed my boot manager was hozed, and said, “Do you want to fix this and reboot?“ “Um, why, sure. Put the original Vista disk in the drive or link the Vista iso to the VM’s CD drive.īoot off the Vista DVD, and choose “repair my computer”.

Enjoy the nice “winload.exe is missing or corrupt”. Since it was used as a secondary drive, it’s boot info is toast. Having the second VM think you’re potentially dual-booting is bad news.)īoot back up the original VM. But do remove the original VM’s disk from the new VM’s profile. (Yeah, having backup copies of VMs is kinda handy, and you spent all that time waiting for the huge files to copy already. Shut down this new VM, unlink the second disk, and delete. I click ok, and the partition magically resized. Apparently I’m entering the size to expand the partition by, not the new size of the partition. Vista’s disk manager is available by right-clicking Computer, choosing Manage, and choosing Disk Management.Ĭlick on the second disk, right-click to choose expand, and enter the size. I added a second hard drive, pointed it to an existing disk: the original VM’s disk, and booted the new VM. I copied the VM, opened the copy in VMware Workstation, and edited the new VM’s profile. The host’s Disk Management didn’t see the mounted disk. Booting the VM and trying to resize the partition failed miserably.Ģ wrong #2. Wouldn’t I love it if I could resize the system partition. vmware-vdiskmanager is in the VMware Workstation directory, the *.vmdk file is wherever your VM data is.Ģ wrong #1. vmware-vdiskmanager expands the disk, not the partition.

vmware-vdiskmanager -x 32GB myDisk.vmdk That was easy … kinda.

I didn’t want a D: drive, I wanted a bigger C: drive. Yeah, I could’ve just created a new virtual disk, called it D: and been done with it, but I wanted more space for Documents, Program Files, Windows Updates, etc, etc. I’ve loaded up a Vista VMware session with all sorts of fun gizmos, and came to a perplexing dilema: “My VM disk is too small”.

Vmware download vmdk file too small