Alternative way to fix the May-Nov 2011 TFS VPC for the Low Disk Space issue

As I was working with the awesome Visual Studio 2010 VM created by Brian Keller, it just recently expired and found that the new released ‘edition’ that will expire Nov 2011 had a problem with low disk space. I sent an e-mail to vskitfdbk@microsoft.com. Just a few hours later Brian replied and had a fix available as explained here. Awesome support!

So here is what I did to fix my local disk, without downloading the files again.

1. Find a disk or partition with at least 40GB free disk space
2. Download and install VHD Resizer from vmToolkit
3. Run VHD Resizer and select the Visual Studio 2010 RTM Hard Disk.vhd
4. Enter Destination Vhd name and change
   Type: Dynamic
   New Size: 100 GB
   
5. Now click the resize button and let it do its work. (Note: it has to copy 40 GB so it can take a while)
   
   Since it has become a Dynamic disk, its size is actually a bit smaller, it only copies used sectors.
6. Next step is to create a new Virtual Machine.
   I tend to create a new differencing disk based on the Visual Studio 2010 vhd, with undo disks enabled. So I also set the parent disk (Visual Studio 2010 Nov 2011.vhd) to Read-only, see the above screenshot. 
7. Start the VM
   
   Note that you still have low disk space, let’s fix that!
8. Start Computer Management and select Disk Management
   
9. Right-click the C drive and select Extend Volume…
   
   Click Next/Finish through the wizard, you should now have a single volume capable of holding 100 GB
10. We now have lots of ‘virtual’ free space.
    
11. Finally, if you have undo-disks enabled, shut down the VM and Apply Changes.

Thanks again to Brian Keller for his superb fast response on this. Knowing that he has to spend about a week to prepare and create these VM’s every time it is amazing that he keeps providing these. I was also a bit surprised that I did not find any reference of this problem. I would have expected that these VM’s are used a lot around the world. Perhaps it is only the Windows (7) Virtual PC version that has this problem. I expect most people run these using Hyper-V.