I'm running VMWare Player on 64-bit Win7. I have exactly one guest OS within it: 32-bit Ubuntu 12.04. It's virtual disk space is 16GB: It's partitions take up all 16GB: 15GB primary and 1GB swap space. They are ~100% full. My host OS Win7 has 10GB free space on it. I want to expand my Ubuntu's virtual disk by ~4GB. When I attempt to do so it inevitably fails saying "There is not enough space on the file system for the selected operation".
I shutdown my Virtual Ubuntu. Then I open VMWare Player and Click on my Ubuntu OS. I don't "Play Virtual Machine". I click "Edit Virtual Machine Settings". Then I highlight the Hard Disk. It says Current Size: 15.1GB, System Free 10GB, Maximum Size 16GB. I choose Utilities-Expand. It shows Maximum Disk Size (GB) 16.0. If I even attempt to increase it to 16.1 it gives me that error. "There is not enough space on the file system for the selected operation".
Best Answer
OK I figured it out. VMWare Player doesn't expand your disk in place. It creates a new file of the new size then copies the contents of the old file to the new file. So if you want to expand from 16GB to 20GB, you need 36GB, so that a 16GB file and a 20Gb file can coexist while the contents of the 16GB file is copied over to the 20GB file