Windows Tip: Five ways to expand a virtual hard drive
The other day I was faced with a conundrum. On my laptop, I have a second copy
of Windows running as a virtual machine under Virtual PC 2007, and I use the
virtual machine regularly to VPN into a remote corporate intranet. The reason
I don't use my physical machine (i.e. the copy of Windows running on my laptop)
to VPN into the remote network is because I don't want the remote network's
Group Policy settings locking down my physical machine -- they can do anything
they want with my virtual machine, but don't touch my laptop!
When I created my virtual machine I had foolishly set the maximum size of the
dynamically expanding virtual hard drive (VHD) too small and now I was running
out of space, yikes! What to do? Find some way of expanding my VHD to make some
more room. Here are five possible ways I found of doing this, in order from
most geeky to least:
1. Follow Benjamin Guinebertière's blog post concerning how he managed
to do this. Gotta love robocopy!
2. Try the image-based approach outlined in Christian Saborío's blog post. What, never heard of BartPE?
3. Get VHD Utility from Xtralogic. Costs $24.95. There's also a trial version
you can download and use for 30 days but it only increases a VHD by 1 GB. The
geeky thing would be to write a batch file that kept incrementing the size of
your VHD until it reaches the size you need.
4. Use VHD Resizer, which is part of the vmToolkit. I'm not sure if this costs
anything-I tried to download it but it asked me to sign in, and geeks don't
like signing into things.
5. Create a second VHD and add it to your virtual machine, then move as much
as you can from your system disk to your new data disk.
Guess what method I ended up using? The least geeky approach i.e. number 5.
Why? Because the main problem was my Outlook archive file which had grown to
almost 8 GB, so I simply moved this to my data drive and pointed Outlook to
it and now my problem is solved.
Moral of the story: geeks don't always do geeky things!