Expand a disk in VMware

19th July 2022

Expanding the disk in Vmware is the easy part. Shut down the VM, edit it’s disk and increase the allocated space.

Windows still doesn’t add the space to it’s OS disk until you tell it to.
Right click on the start menu button and choose “Disk Manager”
you will notice that there is now unallocated space at the right of Disk 0 or whichever you expanded.
Problem1: Windows puts a Recovery partition at the end of the disk, AND you can’t delete it with Partition Manager
Solution1: start a command prompt as administrator and run the following commands

  • Open a Command Prompt as an administrator, type diskpart, and press enter
  • Type list disk
    • Likely, you have only one virtual disk attached to your VM
  • Type select disk 0
  • Type list partition
    • Take note of the number of the “Recovery” partition
  • Type select partition #
  • Type delete partition override

In partition manager you can now right click on your partition and say expand disk. It was instantaneous for me.

Extend Volume, Next

when asked for the new size, decrease the final size by 1000mb. We will use this extra space for our recovery partition

Create a New Simple Volume using the 1000mb of free space at the end of the disk, do not assign a drive letter, you can name the partition Recovery

Open DISKPART again as Administrator

list disk
select disk 0 (or whatever)
list part
select part 4 (or whatever partition you just make, hint it’s 1000mb)

reagentc /disable

  1. Set the WinRE image

reagentc /setreimage /path R:\Recovery\WindowsRE\

  1. Re-enable the WinRE environment

reagentc /enable

  1. Doublecheck if the WinRE is active:

D:\iTunes>reagentc /info

Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE) and system reset configuration

Information:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/4027919/recreating-and-enabling-the-recovery-environment-(

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-increase-virtual-disk-size-when-running-windows-10-in-a-vm/