Resizing El Capitan Mac volumes under VMWare Fusion

Apple has made some changes to Disk Utility in OS X 10.11 El Capitan. One of the biggest changes is how the partition tab looks and functions.

Under Yosemite 10.10 and previous it was quite simple to increase the size of a virtual hard disk in VMWare Fusion and then simply expand the volume on the guest Mac OS VM

Increase the size of the virtual disk in VMWare Fusion

Open up Disk Utility in the guest VM

Note that the VMWare Virtual Disk is showing as 107.37GB, yet the Macintosh HD volume is showing as a capacity of 33.5GB

To expand the Macintosh HD volume to the maximum, you just needed to click on the VMWare Virtual Disk, click the partition tab and drag the slider in the bottom right hand corner all the way to the bottom and note the size will change under the Partition Information.

Drag the slider to the bottom

Hit apply and the volume will be expanded. Pretty easy!

But in 10.11 we are presented with this

So we can see that the VMWare Virtual Disk is 94.49GB, but our Macintosh HD volume is only 34.57GB

Hitting the partition button gives us this

And Disk Utility can’t seem to see the extra space!

Grrr.

Fortunately its a trivial task to achieve the same goal using the command line.

So bust open Terminal.app and enter the following command

sudo diskutil resizeVolume / R

This will resize the Volume at / (Macintosh HD) to the maximum (R)