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Shrinking a Virtual Disk

You can physically reclaim space in virtual disks using the shrink feature provided in VMware Tools. For example, if you have removed files from your virtual disk and want to reduce the amount of storage space that the virtual disk consumes on your host operating system, you can remove the excess space from the virtual disk using the Shrink feature.

Running Shrink performs these actions:

Note: To upgrade a virtual hard disk to VMware Workstation 3.1, be sure to select Settings > Upgrade Disk. Running this command does not change the way the disk is stored; rather, it changes the version of VMware Workstation that runs on the virtual hard disk. For example, this command affects the virtual hardware that VMware Workstation uses (such as the virtual hardware that supports USB).

The virtual disks to be shrunk must be booted in persistent mode. (The mode of a virtual disk may be modified before the virtual machine is powered on by choosing Settings > Configuration Editor, selecting the virtual disk, then choosing Persistent as the disk mode.) This operation requires free disk space equal to the size of the virtual disk being shrunk.

To shrink a virtual disk on a Windows guest operating system:

  1. Double-click the VMware Tools icon (generally in the system tray at the end of the taskbar).
  2. Click the Shrink tab.
  3. Select the disk you want to shrink and click Prepare to Shrink.
  4. Follow the on-screen instructions.

To shrink a virtual disk on a Linux guest operating system:

  1. Open VMware Tools. If it is not available, launch it by running vmware-toolbox.
  2. Click the Shrink tab.
  3. Select the mount point for the disk you want to shrink and click Prepare to Shrink.
  4. Follow the on-screen instructions.

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