Increase virtual machine hardisk space

The other day I was upgrading a project to Visual Studio 2008 on my VmWare virtual development environment. But there was not enough space on the virtual hard drive to perform the installation.

There might be smarter ways to solve it but this is how I did it:

1. Shut down your virtual machine from your host machine.

2. run vmware-vdiskmanager from your vmware installation folder on your host:
\vmware-vdiskmanager -x 25GB "v:\VirtualHarddisks\jahevmdk"

The command will take some time to complete so prepare todo some other work
meanwhile.

3. As my disk is the system volume I mounted it in another vm.

4. On the machine with the mounted disk run the following commandline actions with
diskpart:

a. diskpart
b. list disk (list the mounted disks)
c. list volume (lists the different volumes, mine to extend was F: and # 1)
d. select volume=n (n was in my case 1)
e. extend (and your disk is now extended to chosen size)

My user stories were updated during step 2 which was a good thing.

Have a good weekend!