How to Increase VMWare Partition

My latest hack is the following: I ran out of space on the C: partition on my VMWare image. Needed to add a few GB extra. My issue was that I only had VMWare Player and not the Workstation.

VMWare Player cannot perform the partition increase by default, so it needs to be helped (note that VMWare Player and VMWare Workstation cannot coexist on the same machine). I needed the following files from a VMWare Workstation installation:

• vmware-vdiskmanager.exe
  
• vmcryptolib.dll

Run vmware-vdiskmanager.exe inside VMWarePlayer folder (e.g. C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player)

From here the steps were straight forward:

• Convert the partition to be ‘single growable virtual disk’:

vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -r "C:\My Virtual Machines\Image\hdd1.vmdk" -t 0 "C:\My Virtual Machines\Image\hdd1Converted.vmdk"

• Resize the virtual disk to new size (15GB max):

vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -x 15GB "C:\My Virtual Machines\Image\hdd1Converted.vmdk"

• Launch the VMWare Image

• Use a hard disk manager tool (e.g. “Paragon Hard Disk Manager 8.5 Server Edition”) to re-allocate all unused space in the partition to the given disk