vm woes
Getting further into VMware and its great uses, I’ve come to an obstacle regarding disk space. The virtual machine (Ubuntu) was set to a specific allocation of disk space and because of its limited size of disk it would not upgrade to the newer system updates. Here’s what I ended up having to do, I’m using XP sp2 and my VMs are on an external hdd:
First googled up ‘increase vm disk’ and found this. Helpful article pointed to running the disk increase command from dos:
C:\Program Files\VMware\Vmware Workstation\vmware-vdiskmanager -x 8Gb “driveletter:\vm.vmdk”
Once resize was complete, which took almost instantaneously, I booted into the VM and tried to resize the disk. I realized the system disk was locked, something I expected, and so restarted the VM and focused in on it’s loading window, during the VMware loading screen I hit escape to goto Boot Menu. Unfortunately VMware software does not currently allow bios usb booting, they simply have not updated the bios with this feature. This amazes me, as I don’t see any reason not to implement this feature, who has time to make a boot disk from a cdrom, why not share a folder as a virtual cd/floppy? Anyways, inside the VMware software I edited the VM’s CD-rom to open a Gparted ‘live cd iso’ file I downloaded (feature found in VMware Workstation’s edit VM) and then I enabled cd-rom boot during bios screen. Gparted is a great utility to manage partitions.
I ended up having to delete the extended+swap partition to get the boot partition to resize. I’m not sure if the VM even needs a swap, as it never seems to get used on my machine, but nonetheless I reinstated a swap with 257mb space. Applied all new settings (this took a while), exited Gparted, and then stopped the VM, replaced the cdrom back to the regular cdrom drive and not the iso, then re-ran the VM.
