How To : Resize a (VMWare) Virtual Hard Disk using Hard Disk Cloning Tools

When Enough is Not Enough – That is Virtual Hard Disk Space

In the last Two posts on the subject of resizing VMWare Virtual Hard Disks, we reviewed the following methods for resizing a Virtual Machines Virtual Hard Disk:

1. Using VMWare Virtual Machine Converter Utility to Resize a Virtual Hard Disk
2. Using VDiskManager to Resize a Virtual Hard Disk on VMWare Virtual Machines.

This article covers yet another method for resizing a VMWare Virtual Machines Virtual Hard Disk

Method 3 – How to Use Ghost or another 3rd party imaging product to shrink a disk

As always Safety First. Make sure you have a backup of your Virtual Machines / Virtual Hard Disks.

Here is a step by step overview of what you need to do to resize a VMware Virtual Machines Virtual Hard Disk:

1. Shutdown the virtual machine you want to resize
2. Add a second virtual disk of the new larger or desired size to the VM you want to resize
3. Use Ghost (Or any Drive Imaging Software) to clone the first disks partition to your second virtual disk
4. Once complete make sure the second virtual disk is made ‘Active’
5. Switch your disks by editing the virtual machine settings and switching the SCSI id’s (0:0 and 0:1)
6. If the virtual machine boots OK and you verify that everything works then shutdown the VM and remove the original virtual disk and delete it.

The above process will work to resize a Virtual Hard Disk in either direction. That is to say Shrink the Virtual Hard Disk Size or Expand the Virtual Hard Disk Size.

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