Adding HardDrive to VMWare WinXp Virtual Machine

Underestimating the persistent storage of a virtual machine (VM) is pretty standard for me. I generally define my VM hard drive pretty conservatively to avoid wasting filesystem space, adding a new hard drive as required. This is the procedure I go through to add a new hard drive to a WinXp VM.

First, create a new virtual hard drive with VMWare. Begin by editing your VM preferences.



Next, add a new hard drive to your VM.





That completes adding the hard drive to the virtual machine, the next steps are required by the guest OS to get WinXp to recognize the new hard drive.

You first need to start up the disk management application.


You then need to open the c:\WINDOWS\system32\compmgmt property file.
Double-click on the Disk Management selection and a wizard will pop up, follow along with the wizard.










After the partion wizard has completed, exit computer management and you should now have a newly created hard drive on your system.
Viola.