vmware is neat

May 15, 2008Dan No Comments »

So at work I run linux on my machine. Since the rest of our network is on a windows domain, I run vmware to host a windows virtual machine on top of my linux desktop. All in all, it works really well. I know I am way more productive using virtual desktops and a lite window manager (fluxbox) than I would be using windows XP.

Vmware is pretty neat. When I set it up about 2 years ago, I gave it a 7 gig partition for windows to reside on. Well finally I filled it up — windows has been bugging me about low disc space for the last several weeks. The first step is to resize the container file that stores your guest operating system. Do this by running vmware-vdiskmanager. To resize the vm named Windows-XP-Professional to 12 GB total size, the command looks like:

vmware-vdiskmanager -x 12GB Windows-XP-Professional.vmdk

Now that essentially resized the harddisk on which the vm resides. Now we need to resize the actual NTFS partition windows is using. The best way I’ve found to do this is by using the GParted liveCD. Boot your vm using this CD (press ESC while booting to get to the boot menu) and the graphical interface pretty much takes over. Partitioning is just like using Partition Magic, etc. After expanding the NTFS partition to the full 12GB size available, windows is happy and I have plenty of space.

I did run into some issues where GParted wanted to individually check most every possible SCSI device on my system (/dev/sda, /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc…so on) but that timed out after a couple of minutes and I was able to continue. I chalk that up to a funny configuration I must be using on gentoo, because I didn’t see anyone else was having trouble with it.

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