Warning: If you modify a partition table incorrectly you may lose all of your data. By reading further you agree to take responsibility for all consequences resulting from following the instructions below.

Have you run out of disk space on your virtual Windows XP boot drive in VMware Fusion? This is a brief guide that shows you how to expand your Windows XP boot partition when you’re running XP as a guest OS under VMware Fusion 3 on OS/X. Please read through the entire article before beginning.

Prerequisites

• Host OS: VMware Fusion 3.1.2 or higher running on OSX 10.5 or higher
• Guest OS: Windows XP Service Pack 2 or higher
• Hardware: Enough free disk space on the host to expand the guest hard drive, and enough space on a backup drive to store the guest VM image.

Procedure

1. Shut down the guest OS. Fusion won’t let you modify the VM configuration while the guest is running.
2. Make a backup copy of your VM image. I suggest not relying on Time Machine in case only one copy of your VM fits in your Time Machine and Time Machine decides to update your backup in the middle of one of the following steps.
3. Open the Fusion “Snapshots” dialog box for the guest OS, and delete all snapshots. Unfortunately Fusion won’t let you expand the disk until you’ve deleted all snapshots. But fortunately you just made a complete backup of the VM in the prior step, in case anything goes wrong.
4. Open the “Hard Disks” pane of the Fusion settings dialog for the guest OS.
5. Fusion may require you to click “Clean Up Disk” before proceeding, which can take several hours.
6. Increase the disk size as desired, and click “Apply”. This may also take quite some time.
7. Download the stable GParted CD ISO image. GParted is the open source GNU Partition Editor. The CD image contains a bootable Linux image that runs GParted on startup.
8. Open the “CDs & DVDs” pane of the Fusion settings dialog for the guest OS.
9. Add the ISO image you just downloaded as a CD drive (select “Use disc image”).
10. Open the “Advanced” pane of the Fusion settings dialog for the guest OS.
11. In the “Startup Device” tab, select the CD drive you just added.
12. Start up the guest OS, which should present a boot menu that includes an option to start GParted; select it to boot the GParted Linux image.
13. In the GParted interface you might find that your mouse doesn’t work, in which case you can use Windows keyboard UI conventions to navigate among controls and invoke menu items. Select the partition you want to expand and click “Resize/Move”.
14. After entering the new larger size for the partition, click the “Resize/Move” button in the dialog box.
15. Click the “Apply” button in the main UI in GParted. It should display a dialog indicating success.
16. Shut down the VM.
17. Open the “Advanced” pane of the Fusion settings dialog for the guest OS.
18. In the “Startup Device” tab, select the original boot drive.
19. Open the “CDs & DVDs” pane of the Fusion settings dialog for the guest OS.
20. Delete the CD drive you added earlier.
21. Start the VM and allow Windows to run the chkdsk utility on the boot partition.

That’s it!