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Delete a virtual drive in VMWare Fusion for Mac?

Okay, so I kind of dove deeply into your tutorial on how to create virtual drives for VMWare Fusion on my Mac system. Fun. But now I have four extra 2GB drives in my virtual Windows system. What's the easy way to delete these virtual Fusion hard drive images?


Dave's Answer:

That's funny. Then again, when you're working with Windows, it is a rare luxury to have a half-dozen drives to test software against. I'm thinking it was E:, F:, G:, H: and I:, or does Win7 skip "I" because of potential alphabetic confusion? :-)

In any case, you must have seen the button that lets you delete the virtual drives since it's at the bottom of the window that lets you specify the size of the drive, but that's okay. I can imagine in your zeal to create as many drives as possible (is there a theoretical limit? I expect so) that you weren't paying attention to little details like how to delete them again when you were done.

It's all good, though.

So to delete the drives, start up VMWare Fusion, but shut down Windows itself. Now you can go to "Settings":

Once you're there, you'll see a window full of icons:

Look closely at the list of hard drives shown. They're actually all virtual drives, so you'll have quite a row of them. I have two, a SCSI-based and an IDE-based virtual drive, as you can see.

Find the drive you want to delete and click on it. I'll axe "Hard Drive 2" for this example. You'll end up seeing something like this:

The trick is to click on "Advanced options" to reveal the delete button that you seek:

Now you can see it, the Remove Hard Disk button at the bottom. If you're double sure that it's the virtual drive you want to delete, click on the button.

A few options appear before it's committed:

If you're 100% sure you're done with the virtual drive and all its contents, use "Move to Trash" so that you don't waste disk space. If you want to keep the virtual drive image but simply have it not visible to your current Windows system, choose "Keep File". Realized you don't want to remove the drive after all? "Cancel" is that choice.

So there ya go. I'm curious: how are you finding VMWare Fusion on your computer? Works for what you need?


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Categorized: Mac OS X Help   (Article 10395, Written by )
Tagged: remove virtual drive, vmware fusion, vmware virtual drive
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Reader Comments To Date: 2

Sam said, on September 23, 2012 9:05 PM:

Hello, I would be very grateful if you could help me with this situation. I deleted my virtual machine file but forgot to delete hard drive (virtual hard drive), and now 60GB space on my hard drive is spared to virtual machine hard drive, and I can't get rid of it.

Dave Taylor said, on September 25, 2012 7:46 AM:

The usual place to find that is in "Documents" -> "Virtual Machines", Sam. Look there for the 60GB of space used, and just delete the entire folder if you're done with VMWare Fusion.

Starbucks coffee cup I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you, Dave, for all your helpful information by buying you a cup of coffee!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!











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