Windows 7 RC Hard Drive Allocation

[brjames]

I've been looking everywhere for an answer to this and can't find anything, so I'm hoping this community can help.

I downloaded a copy of the Windows 7 RC recently and got it to install in Fusion with no problems. It's been running the GIS software I need for school wonderfully. However, there is one problem. When I go to the Start menu and select "Computer", the window that comes up shows me that I only have 5GB left out of 39.9GB. However, when I set up the VM, I allocated 80GB for the hard drive. The settings in Fusion show it set at 80, and I can't adjust it. I've also tried adding a second hard drive (which I've done successfully in an XP VM I have) and Win7 wouldn't recognize it.

Any ideas from the community?

I'm doing all of this on an early 2008 MacBook Pro 2.4GHz with a 200GB hard drive, 4GB of RAM, running Mac OS 10.5.7 and VMWare Fusion 2.0.5.

[Michael Roy]

This sounds normal, depending on your setup.

What sort of disk type are you using? (Monolithic or split? Sparse or Preallocated?)

When using Split disks (2GB chunks) in a Sparse fasion (as opposed to pre-allocating) the file sizes of the actual VM's will only be as large as is required by the guest OS.

When more space is needed, new 'splits' are created and the vmwarevm grows in size to accomodate this.

If you're using a monolithic disk (one big vmdk file),Fusion needs to be able to duplicate the total ammount of space on the drive to re-size it, so if you don't have another 80GB free i can see it not allowing you to do this.

I'm assuming a few things based on your setup, but I'm fairly certain that's what's going on here.

Let me know if this answers it for you =)

Also,

See: Virtual Machine Settings > Disk Type

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-1110

[brjames]

If you're using a monolithic disk (one big vmdk file),Fusion needs to be able to duplicate the total ammount of space on the drive to re-size it, so if you don't have another 80GB free i can see it not allowing you to do this.

This sounds like it's probably the issue. I didn't preallocate the full VM size, but I'm not using the split (2GB pieces) option either. Does that actually work better? I sounds like it might. I'm close to having a full hard drive on my MBP, so this makes a lot of sense.

Thanks for the feedback!

[Michael Roy]

This sounds like it's probably the issue. I didn't preallocate the full VM size, but I'm not using the split (2GB pieces) option either. Does that actually work better? I sounds like it might. I'm close to having a full hard drive on my MBP, so this makes a lot of sense.

Yah, that's definitely what it is then. As far as 'better', it's a subjective thing, and it all depends on your needs. There shouldn't be much performance difference between the two, but the split files are handy if you need to migrate them to a FAT32 formatted hard drive, or if you need to shrink your virtual disk size.

Thanks for the feedback!

You're welcome =)

Let me know if you have any other questions.

[brjames]

I appreciate the feedback. I may try that split option and see how it works.

Thanks again!