A virtual disk is a file (or a set of files) on the host system that appears as a physical disk drive to the guest operating system. Virtual hard disk files store information such as the operating system, program files, and data files and have a .vmdk extension. In this article, I will show you how to extend a VM Hard Disk on VMware Workstation. Kindly refer to these related articles: ESXI 6.7 ALARM: Seat disk exhaustion on 10, and how to convert a GPT disk into an MBR disk error: Windows cannot be installed on drive 0 Partition 1.
Virtual disks can be stored as files on the host computer or on a network file server. It does not matter whether the physical disk that holds the files is IDE or SCSI. A virtual IDE drive can be stored on an IDE drive or on a SCSI drive.
If you have a snapshot created for this specific VM you wish to extend, you will never be able to expand your hard disk. You need to delete the snapshot first. To do this, please visit this link. You may want to see how to add and remove a new virtual disk from a VM on VMware Workstation.
Extend VM Hard Disk on VMware Workstation
In order to extend your VM Hard Disk, you will have to stop the VM and edit the virtual machine settings as shown below.
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This will open the Virtual Machine Settings. Click on Expand
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Enter Disk Size on Expand Disk Capacity wizard
This will open the Expand Disk Capacity wizard. As you can see, the current size is 80GB and I wish to add 20 GB more.
Click on Expand when you are done.
The Hard Disk is currently being expanded
Once it is expanded, you will get a confirmation message as shown below.
Click on Ok to proceed.
Click on OK again to close the Virtual Machine.
As you can see the Hard Disk has been extended.
Launch the Computer Management tool
Next, power up the VM and click on Windows Administrative Tool in order to launch the Computer Management tool
Click on Computer Management as shown below. There are other ways to go about this (You can use Windows Search or compmgmt.msc) etc.
Please see How to extend System Drive Partition on Windows, How to install Windows Server 2022 on VMware Workstation, How to enable Hyper-V on a VMware Workstation, How to determine the last boot time of a Windows Serve, and How to fix Unable to update the password value provided for the new password and Password Policy.
Extend the Partition
As you can see from the image below, we have 20GB of unallocated space. We will have to extend the C drive (existing partition) with this space.
Right-click on the Disk Drive and select Extend
This will open the Extend Volume Wizard. Click on Next to Continue.
I will be allocating the entire space, therefore, I will just click on Next.
The space has been allocated. I will click on Finish to complete this process.
As you can see, the previously unallocated space has been utilised by the existing partition.
I hope you found this blog post helpful on how to extend a VM Hard Disk on VMware Workstation. If you have any questions, please let me know in the comment session.
