I was installing Visual Studio 2013 today in my development environment – which I run inside of VMware Workstation – and it warned me that I didn’t have enough free disk space. No problem – that’s one of the wonderful things about running this in VMware, I can just add another disk on-the-fly with minimal effort.

I added the additional disk and opened Server Manager to initialize and format it but I got an error message of “The disk is offline because of policy set by an administrator“. That was a new one for me. Google lead me to a few different Microsoft articles that weren’t helpful at all. After a few tries I was able to find a VMware KB article that describes the exact steps to get past this error so that I could start using the new disk.

Here’s the post: Unable to initialize a second virtual disk within Windows 2008 or Windows 2008 R2

If you follow the steps exactly as described (there aren’t many and it isn’t hard) you’ll then be able to initialize and format your disk for use. I did this and then adjusted the install path for VS2013 to point to the newly added disk. Problem solved – it proceeded without error.

I hope this helps someone else and saves you time searching online for an answer! :)