VMWare Fusion Disk Resize and Grow NTFS Partition
Use Gnome Partition Editor (gpartd).
Fusion 2.x allows you to resize a disk but does not grow the underlying NTFS partition. Once you’ve resized the disk using the vmware gui, you need to grow the partition. You can get gpartd on a livecd; the application groks a wide variety of file systems including NTFS.
Configure your guest to boot from CD (change order in BIOS) and attach the gpartd iso to your CD device (make sure the device is “connected” too). Reboot your guest and it will boot into the livecd with the gpartd application started. The gpartd tool is self-explanatory (big move/resize button…).
Note that on some machines (like mine) VMWare POSTs too quickly to hit F2 to get you into the BIOS. The solution is to add the following line to your VM’s vmx file.
bios.forceSetupOnce = "TRUE"
This will force your VM into the BIOS on the next start. Note that VMWare will reset this flag so, if you want to boot into the BIOS in the future, you will have to go re-edit your vmx file (nothing special needed to edit the vmx; it’s just a text file)
Credit to Jeffrey Blattman’s post for the pointer to gpartd. Info on the vmx hack can be found here.
Useful hint and links, thanks a lot. Just what I needed to solve the problem.
(You may want to turn off your blogging software’s smart quotes for the bios.forceSetup thing to make the line copy and pastable.)
“Fixed” the smart quoting on the config file entry so it can be copied/pasted