 Hello everybody! In today's video, we'll discuss expanding a virtual disk or adding new disks in such virtual machines as VMware, VirtualBox and Hyper-V. When a new virtual machine is created, you also create a virtual hard disk for the machine and you specify the disk size in the settings. However, as you work with the machine, it may turn out that this disk size is not enough for your needs. What should you do in this case? How to increase the size of an existing disk? After you start doing the things described in this video, I strongly recommend backing up your virtual hard disk file. So let's begin. And we start with VMware. VMware Workstation is quite a popular tool for working with virtual machines. It has a good graphical interface, and it is simple and convenient enough for personal use. By the way, in our channel, there is a detailed video about creating a VMware virtual machine that I've followed the link in the description to watch it. To expand the disk, start VMware Workstation. Create a necessary virtual machine. In the top menu, click on the Virtual Machine button. Here, click on Settings. Now choose the hardware tab and click on the Hard Disk option. In the menu on the right, find the Expand Disk Capacity option. Click Expand next to it. Now specify the new disk size and click Expand. After some time, the program will inform you that the disk was successfully expanded. After that, power on the virtual machine and check the Disk Capacity in the Disk Management window. Now you need to extend the volume on the virtual machine. Right-click on the disk and choose Extend Volume. Add the required amount of space and click Next. As you can see, the volume has been extended and all data remained intact. Also, if the original disk size of the hard disk is insufficient, you can add one more virtual disk. You can both add an existing disk or create a new one. And here is how you do it. Open down your virtual machine. In the Information page, click Edit Virtual Machine Settings. In the Hardware tab, select the Hard Disk option. Find the Add button below and click on it. It starts the Add Hardware Reset. Select Hard Disk and click Next. Leave the predefined settings as it is and click Next again. In the Select Disk window, you can give a path to an existing virtual disk or create a new virtual disk. In my case, I'll be creating a new one and then I click Next. Specify the virtual disk capacity and choose the option to store the virtual disk as a single file. Click Next. Give the path a name for this disk. I will leave all settings and default values. Click Finish. As you can see, the virtual hard disk is now created and displayed on this list. Click OK to leave the settings. Now, power on the virtual machine. The operating system recognizes our freshly created virtual disk as an unallocated space with our partitions, but we'll fix it by initializing the disk. Click on the Start menu, go to Disk Management. The Disk Management Integrated Utility has detected the new disk automatically and suggested to initialize it. Click OK. Go back to the Utility window. Click on the disk with unallocated space and choose New Simple Volume. Click Next. By the volume size, click Next. Select a drive letter and click Next. In the Next window, you can change the volume label if necessary. Click Next. Finally, click Finish. The disk will be formatted and then ready to use. Hello friends! If you need to recover deleted data, view or restore removed browser history, Hetman software products will help you. Follow the link in the description, download the necessary program for free, install it and analyze the disk. The utility will show you the data you can recover, so you will be able to view it or get it back. In our channel and blog, you will find solutions to any problem, from installing an operating system or configuring it, to fixing possible bugs and errors or optimizing mobile gadgets. Our specialists will answer any questions you ask in your comments under the videos or articles. When creating a virtual machine in the Virtual Box tool, it is difficult to calculate the exact disk space you will need after the operating system is installed. There are two methods of adding free disk space to the virtual machine without removing its data and the virtual machine image itself. Beginning with VirtualBox v6, we can use the graphical feature for resizing virtual disks. In order to use it, start the program, go to the File menu, Virtual Media Manager. Next to the operating system, you will see the virtual size. Go to Virtual Machine and then drag the slider or just type the required size in this field. Then click Apply. Close the Virtual Media Manager and start the operating system. Extend the volume with the help of Disk Management. If you have a different version of VirtualBox, older than version 6, then you need to use the vBoxManage command in the command prompt to increase the disk size. Before you start, shut down the virtual machine and launch the command prompt as administrator. After that, navigate to the root folder containing the program and find the file with the name vboxmanager.exe. Right-click on it and copy its path. Then switch to the command prompt, paste this path and add this command – Modify HD. Now you should give the path to the existing virtual disk, the size of which you need to increase. Go to the folder where your disk is stored and copy its path. Paste it into the command prompt and type this command – Resize and then add the required disk space. Go to the program and stop the guest operating system. After that, extend the volume in the same way as we did it in the previous method. Now that the disk has increased in size, you can continue your work. If this disk runs out of free space soon, you can add or even create a second disk to store your data. This is quite easy. Open the program, click on the required virtual machine, then open the settings. Go to the Storage tab. To set a controller, click on the Add button. You can either add an existing disk or create a new one. Click on Create. Don't change anything in the wizard window and just click Next. Choose a dynamically allocated disk so that it takes less space. Specify your disk location and size and then click Create. Find your disk on the list and click Choose. This will add the new disk. Click OK and run the virtual machine. In the virtual machine, the disk will be empty and without any file system. You will have to initialize the disk just like we did it in VMware Workstation. The last program we'll be exploring today is Hyper-V. The opportunity to change disk size dynamically has been available in Hyper-V since Windows Server 2012 R2. The feature called Online VHDX Resize lets you increase or reduce the size of a virtual disk. You can modify the size of any Hyper-V disk, be it fixed size or dynamic. And here is how you do it. Open Hyper-V Virtual Machine Manager. Select a virtual machine, then open the settings. Choose a required virtual disk and click Edit. In the wizard window that opens, choose Expand. Specify the new size of the virtual hard disk. Then start the guest operating system. Open the Disk Management panel. There is an unallocated area on the disk. Click on the volume that needs to be extended. Keep in mind that you can only extend the volume which is located on the left of the unallocated space. As you can see, now this disk has increased in size. Also, you can modify the size of a VHDX disk with PowerShell. And here is how you do it. You need to get a full path to the virtual machine disk. Go to Hyper-V Manager, click on the virtual machine, then open Settings. In the CSSI Control tab, click on the disk to see its path. Start PowerShell as Administrator. After that, type the command ResizeVHDPath and paste the path to the virtual machine disk. Then add the command SizeBytes and give the size to which you'd like to expand that disk. Remember that if you give a virtual disk size smaller than the actual space it occupies on the disk, you will get an error. After that, you'll have to extend the volume in the Disk Management tool. Similarly to all other hypervisors we have explored today, in Microsoft Hyper-V you can add a virtual hard disk or create a new one. To create a new virtual disk, start Hyper-V Manager. Right-click on the virtual machine and open Settings. In the SCSI tab, specify the disk type and click Add. Then click New. In the new virtual hard disk wizard, click Next. At the second stage, select Fix Size. Give the disk name and path. After that, specify the disk size. And finally, click Finish. After that, click Apply and OK. When you start the virtual machine, the new disk should be initialized and partitioned so that you can use it in your work. Just follow the same procedure for initialization as before. Also, I would like to remind you, if you have lost your virtual machine data for any reason, you can visit our channel to find a good video about recovering virtual machine data. And that is all for now. Hit the Like button and subscribe to our channel. Thank you for watching.