virtual machine is stored is almost full yet Window C drive says 29GB free

Getting message vmware has paused this virtual machine because the disk which virtual machine is stored iss almost full. to continue, free up 962 MB of disk space. My Mac has over 160GB free. Bootcamp has 40GB but shows only 1GB free. VMware virtual machine COPY has 5 GB and VMware virtual machine has 25GB. Yet when I go into VMware vitual machine the C drive says 40GB size and 11GB used with 29GB free. Where do I free up space??

Solution 1:

Try the option in VMware to "shrink" your disk. I believe it will reclaim unused space.

Solution 2:

To avoid file system free space percentage, the following forum refers to an advanced parameter to add in the VMX text configuration file:

mainMem.freeSpaceCheck = "FALSE"

But then you have to be careful to have enough free space, maybe with another tool to check it for you.

Another option is to use "shrink" action, that will reclaim unused space from the disk image. But not all virtual disk image types support "shrinking" and that operation may require at least 2 GiB free space or at worst the same disk image size itself.

I recommend the virtual disk type "1 : growable virtual disk split in 2GB files" to ease disk management. VMWare Virtual Disk Manager tools is useful to create, grow and convert image disks. It is available in Workstation product or as a standalone executable in VMWare Server.