My advice: leave it alone because you'll waste time with little to gain for it. The way you have the guest configured means that extra 20GB won't be used and won't be taken from your Mac's file system.
As André states, if the virtual disk is not set to pre-allocate disk space, the virtual disk is sparsely allocated (this is the default). That means that disk space on the Mac will be allocated only when the VM writes to its virtual hard drive. Any disk expansion of a sparsely allocated disk simply increases the maximum size of the virtual disk. For a sparsely allocated disk, that means adding a minute amount of metadata, and some extra empty "chunk" files if the virtual disk is configured to split the the virtual disk into pieces (again, this is the default behavior).
You should have notiiced that addiing 20GB to the virtual disk did not automatically make the VM consume 20GB more disk space (you can check this in the macOS Finder). That's sparse allocation at work.
You also saw that the additional 20GB of space in the VM is marked as unallocated. That means that the C: drive partition can't write to that space as it stands. Windows won;t use that space unless you expand the C: drive partition using Windows Disk Management.
No write to the space, no additional disk allocation on your Mac.
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- Paul (technogeezer)
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Original Message:
Sent: Sep 21, 2024 02:59 PM
From: lewis moore
Subject: Resizing Virtual disk
No I made a new install of windows 11, it automatically set 64GB I believe for the Virtual machine and I accepted. After install I thought I need more so I shut down the machine and go to settings>hardest I see the Virtual disk.vmdk, below it has. bar to adjust size of hard rive. So I increased it to 84GB before I changed my mind, now I can't lower it any lower than what is been expanded too. If this doesn't actually take up any space as its unallocated black bar in my disk management on windows thats ok, if so like to shrink it so need Vmconveter, if so any link.
Original Message:
Sent: Sep 21, 2024 03:34 AM
From: Andre Pett
Subject: Resizing Virtual disk
Virtual disks are sparse provisioned by default, which means that physical dis space is allocated only if require, i.e. the 20 additional GB should not consume any disk space (except for a few MB of metadata).
However, from what you write, it seems that you opted to crated pre-allocated virtual disks!?
The official way to reduce a virtual disk's size is to use the VMware Converter.
André
Original Message:
Sent: Sep 20, 2024 06:40 PM
From: lewis moore
Subject: Resizing Virtual disk
I've installed VMFusion and windows 11 Pro. I gave it the default 64GB I believe on install, and I shut down the machine and resized the hard drive and increase it by 20GB. Problem is I;ve changed my mind, and when I tried reducing the size it gives me message saying it can only be the size it is or higher.
Reading through the help articles and none of the settings are there way they've stated, alike the command prompt vmware-tools. I can see the 20GB unallocated in disk management, ive defrayed and set it as new simple volume as E but it still won't let me resize the harddrive via VmFusion settings. Im missing 20GB of space on my MacOS I won't be using currently.