How to increase disk space on a Windows VM

Wow, look at this! Two posts in one week! What the hell happened? I used to bring you daily geeky goodness, but now you are reduced to two lousy articles a week? I digress.

Anyway, back to the purpose of this article which is how one goes about adding more disk space to a Windows virtual machine in VMWare. Now I found this article which talks about doing this using a Knoppix live CD, however I found an easier way, and it is built into Windows.

All you have to do is the following:

1. Power down you virtual machine
2. In your VMWare manager (vSphere, etc.) edit the VM’s settings
3. Increase the provisioned size of the disk and click OK
4. Power on the virtual machine
5. Verify in Disk management that the VM sees the new unformatted disk space
6. Open a command prompt (In Vista/2008 as Administrator)
7. Run diskpart
8. Type list volume
9. Type select volume <volume number>
10. Type extend
11. Type exit

That’s it. No live CD. No nothin’! Just more disk space!

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Checking CD or DVD Images: Virtual Disk Drive

There have been plenty of times when burning disks that I have incidentally made a few extra coasters. It is inevitable really. Most often, the problem is with the media. If you buy cheap disks you get a lot of bad burns. This can be fixed sometimes by burning the disk at a slower speed, or by making sure the disk is cleaned first.


What if you have a bad disk image though? What if there is a problem with the burning utility you are using and it somehow corrupts the data when creating the disk image (Even if you burn straight to disk the burning utility first creates a disk image in a temporary folder before actually writing). If the data is bad, the burn will be bad. It is that simple.

In order to prevent bad burns, you have to have a way to check the image. The way I do it, is by using a virtual disk drive. There are a few out there, but my all time favorite is Daemon Tools. Daemon Tools lets you mount the disk image and browse the files, or if it is a movie disk, you can play it on your software DVD player just like you would if you slipped a DVD in the drive. You can ensure your data's integrity before you waste money creating coasters.

Another good use for it, as I mentioned above, is for playing video's without the media. If you backup a movie to your laptop hard drive using something like RipIt4Me, you can bring a movie with you on a business trip without having to carry extra disks. It's all about convenience, and Daemon Tools brings that convenience to you for free.

So whether you need to check your data before burning, or you just want to limit the amount of DVD's and CD's you have to carry with you, you should take a gander at Daemon Tools.

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