October 6th, 2009 
Kiwi Si 
After moving a VMware Workstation VM from one PC to another you may receive the following error message when going to start it:
“VMware Workstation cannot open one of the virtual disks needed by this VM because it is larger that the maximum size supported by the host file system.”
The most common cause is that, as the error message outlines, the underlying file system on which the VM is being run from doesn’t support larger files than 2GB. Your VMs VMDK disk will, in the majority of cases be bigger than this. For example a hard disk formatted with FAT32 will throw up this error.
Though not to worry all is not lost as you can tell VMware Workstation to skip checking any underlying disk file size limitations (ie: 2GB) by adding the following line to your VMs VMX file. Note: The VMX file is generally found in the same directory as your VMs VMDK file.
diskLib.sparseMaxFileSizeCheck= "FALSE"
If you are going to be moving VMs between PCs that have this 2GB file limitation then you should consider configuring any future virtual disks to use a set of files limited to 2GB per file. This setting is defined at the time of creating the virtual disk with VMware Workstation.
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Posted in 
My name is Simon Seagrave and I am a London (UK) based Technical Architect. 
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Hi Simon,
You can actually change the disk type after it has been created as well from the command line.
In order to change your virtual disk to a growable virtual disk split in 2GB chunks, run the following command:
vmware-vdiskmanager -r sourceDisk.vmdk -t 1
As always, do make sure to have a working and recent backup before you run the above command. Just in case, so you don’t bump into problems if -for example- you run out of disk space.
cheers!
–
Wil
[Reply]
Kiwi Si Reply:
October 7th, 2009 at 6:05 am
Hi Wil,
Thanks for the useful tip – that will definitely come in useful to others also.
Cheers,
Simon
[Reply]
Hi Kiwi Si,
Thanks you a lot for your article, it really helps me, the error msg, and the line needed to be edited guided me to solve the issue.
YOUR HELP is SIMPLY PERFECT
Ahmad
[Reply]
Kiwi Si Reply:
October 23rd, 2009 at 6:57 am
Hi Ahmad,
Thanks for reading TechHead – glad this helped you solve the problem.
All the best,
Simon
[Reply]
Hi, I came across the same problem. I added diskLib.sparseMaxFileSizeCheck= “FALSE” to vmx file. The system booted fine. But now I ended up with lost data to MAy09 Today is 16Dec09.
Can you explain if it due to this change.
Regards,
Rizwan
[Reply]
Kiwi Si Reply:
December 22nd, 2009 at 9:01 am
Hi Rizwan,
Hmmm, that is strange. I don’t know why this would do this – I assume you are talking about lost data on the VM you are running via VMware Workstation.
Did you get to the bottom of what caused this data loss?
Cheers,
Simon
[Reply]