A long time ago I wrote this article about resizing an IDE virtual disk. I just ran out of diskspace on my Windows 7 VM and I needed to increase the disk. Unfortunately the Windows 7 VM had and IDE disk and the Web Client didn’t allow me to simply increase the size of the VMDK. So this is what I had to do, and yes I agree it should be easier than this.
- Remove the IDE vmdk from the VM
- Edit the “vmdk” file (can be found under cd /vmfs/volumes/<datastore_name>/<vm_name>/)
- Change ddb.adapterType from “ide” to “lsilogic”
- Add the IDE vmdk to the VM
- Change the size of the disk
- Remove the IDE vmdk from the VM
- Edit the “vmdk” file (can be found under cd /vmfs/volumes/<datastore_name>/<vm_name>/)
- Change ddb.adapterType from “lsilogic” to “ide”
- Add the IDE vmdk to the VM
- Power on the VM and “extend” the partition within Windows 7
There might be an easier way of doing this, and I guess using “vmkfstools -X” would also work, I just preferred to take this route instead as I knew it would work.
** note to self, don’t import W7 VMs with an IDE disk, it sucks **