First off, I've DONE my due diligence. I do IT for a living, and I am embarassed for VMWare if it thinks that there is anything intutive or straightforward about resizing virtual disk.
Let's go through the drill, with my noting that other than this particular issue, VMFusion (v 2.0.5) has operated flawlessly for months. I tried to resize the disk several times, however, even on a clean install with both Leopard and VMWare Fusion. A bug apparently exists, if not in the software at least in the minds of the software designers who designed the interface.
OK, from the top. Yet, all snapshots of Windows XP are gone. The slider is seen just fine, after I (1) shut down the virtual machine; (2) Accessed the menu screen through Settings>Hard Drives. Thus far, no problem.
Now, I have a MBP with an eSATA drive direct from Apple. Too bad VMWare Fusion doesn't see it. Instead, it sees a 186 GB IDE drive and thinks the eSATA is an IDE drive. It displays that in the left sidebar. No problem, it's just a inconsequential bug in VMWare Fusion.
Now, the good news is that the slider correctly shows that about 186 GB of the IDE (sic) drive is on my MBP, which seems correct, though irrelevant. It came with a 200 GB drive, which translates to around 186 GB of usable space. Problem is that Fusion is talking about the mounted Macintosh drivethe eSATA drive which it thinks is an IDE drive--not the virtual drive.
Oh, it inanely lets me increase the size of the Mac drive, even exceeding the drive's actual space limit, but I really wanted to increase the size of the virtual drive. The file name (greyed out) points, of course, to the Bootcamp.vmpk file. But in no case does the bootcamp partitition light up on the left sidebar. Just the IDE (sic) disk lights up, which is NOT the same as the virtual drive.
So clearly I am doing something wrong because everything else works just dandy in the wonderful world of virtualization. Except for my being unable to follow directions that would allow me to resize not my IDE (sic) drive, but my virtual drive.
If I sound frustrated, I am. I have wasted far too much time on this. I need some useful suggestions that, at minimum, acknowledge what I have stated above and do not merely repeat the material that's been posted before about deleting snapshots, etc. If I have to reinstall Bootcamp just to resize the partition, I will be dropping VMWare Fusion and using Parallels as my virtualization tool.
Let's assume that I do not need to be reminded that snapshots must be deleted or that my virtual machine must be shut down, etc. Let's assume that I know how to shut down a virtual OS. Let's assume again that I am doing clean installs and repeatedly got this same silliness. Given what I have reported, what could be the cause? I'm sure it has a remarkably simple solution. It would be nice if VMWare Fusion would tell me (us) what it is.
Thanks in advance.