Extending a VMWare Fusion 4 disk under Lion (10.7.3)

Defragging will bring nothing.

You want to extend a "disk" to 300GB? Is that for one VM or more? Do you have a freely expanding VM "disk" or did you limit the 'disk"?

Do you understand that the VM is just one big "file", thus if you want it enlarged you need the filesize plus the size of the "expanded size" at the same time to perform the expansion?

Well you do not have enough free space do do that: 200GB plus 300GB (during the operation) is 500GB, and then your OS needs also free space to operate.

You could copy the VM to an external disk, instruct VMware to use that file on an external disk, then delete the VM on your hdd, then instruct VMware to expand the file to 300GB to the hdd. That would do it in Parallels.

I think the simple fact is you need a bigger physical hard drive. Something in the 750GB to 1TB range.

You should also look at what is using up space in the OS X side of your hard drive. Deleting files from OS X that you no longer need or moving them to an external drive. Have you though about creating another Virtual Disk inside the VM you want to expand. Then you would have a C and D drives in the virtual machine. By doing that you create a new drive of a total size of 100GB and it will only take up about 10MB of space initially until you start moving files to it. then it will grow in size only for the amount of files you move to it.

In all honesty if you need more the 200GB of HDD space for a virtual machine then maybe you should think about some type of external disk to store some of those files on. You can do that, use an external, inside the VM.

In one of my VMs I have 3 virtual disks all of 60GBs in total size and they only use a total of 10GB of physical hard drive space. I only use VMs for programs that I use that don't run on either Mac OS X or Win 7. I run XP in VMs on both platforms.

If that xp3.vmwarevm file you deleted was a virtual machine main file you should of used Fusion to Remove that virtual machine. You still may be able to do that if it did not get deleted.

Open Fusion and make the Virtual Machine Library visible (sometimes it doesn't show on screen until you go to menu item Window and click on VM Library). Then highlight that XP3 VM and then Right Click on it and select delete.