Adding a Virtual Disk to VMWare

If you need to add another virtual disk to an existing Linux VMWare virtual machine (parts of this can be used to add a physical disk to a non-virtual machine too), do the following steps:

First, shutdown your virtual machine, and make a backup of your virtual disk as a safety precaution.

/sbin/shutdown -h now

Next, Add the new virtual disk in Workstation's VM -> Settings menu. Choose IDE for the virtual hardware.

Start the VM.

Create a partition table on the new disk using fdisk. This is an interactive tool, so you're going to need to answer a few questions.

fdisk /dev/hdb

choose n for "new partition"

choose p for "primary"

type 1 for the partition number

accept the default start and end options (hit Enter twice)

choose w to "write the partition table"

Make a filesystem on the new partition

mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdb1

Mount the filesystem on a temporary location

mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt

Copy the partition you wish to move to the new mount (I use /opt in this example)

cp -rp /opt/* /mnt

Add a line to /etc/fstab to cause your new partition to be mounted at boot

echo '/dev/hdb1 /opt  ext3  defaults  1 1' >> /etc/fstab

Reboot

/sbin/shutdown -r now

After rebooting, you can confirm that your disk setup now has the new disk on the /opt directory mount point by typing on the command line:

df -h

You should see something like

# This file is edited by fstab-sync - see 'man fstab-sync' for details
LABEL=/                 /                       ext3    defaults        1 1
LABEL=/boot             /boot                   ext3    defaults        1 2
none                    /dev/pts                devpts  gid=5,mode=620  0 0
none                    /dev/shm                tmpfs   defaults        0 0
LABEL=/home             /home                   ext3    defaults        1 2
LABEL=/opt              /opt                    ext3    defaults        1 2
LABEL=/opt/IBM          /opt/IBM                ext3    defaults        1 2
none                    /proc                   proc    defaults        0 0
none                    /sys                    sysfs   defaults        0 0
LABEL=/tmp              /tmp                    ext3    defaults        1 2
LABEL=/usr              /usr                    ext3    defaults        1 2
LABEL=/var              /var                    ext3    defaults        1 2
LABEL=SWAP-hda9         swap                    swap    defaults        0 0
/dev/hdb1 /opt  ext3  defaults  1 1
/dev/hdc                /media/cdrom            auto    pamconsole,exec,noauto,managed 0 0
/dev/fd0                /media/floppy           auto    pamconsole,exec,noauto,managed 0 0

That's it.