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Increase hard disk size in VirtualBox 4.x #

(UPDATE: See this post for a far easier and faster method.)

If your VirtualBox virtual machine is running low on disk space, here's how to allocate more:

0. Shut down virtual machine & quit VirtualBox

1. Locate VDI file

$ VBoxManage list hdds
UUID:        xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx
Parent UUID: base
Format:      VDI
Location:    /Users/user/Library/VirtualBox/HardDisks/XP.vdi
State:       created
Type:        normal
Usage:       XP (UUID: yyyyyyyy-yyyy-yyyy-yyyy-yyyyyyyyyyyy)

2. Backup virtual machine

There are two methods:

1. Simply copy the VDI file to another location. (If you try opening this copy in a new VM later, you may receive a "Cannot register the hard disk ... with UUID ... because a hard disk ... with UUID ... already exists in the media registry ..." error. This can be resolved by assigning a new UUID: VBoxManage internalcommands sethduuid XPcopy.vdi ^*)
2. Or use the clonehd command, which creates a cloned copy with a new UUID automatically:
   VBoxManage clonehd XP.vdi XPclone.vdi

3. Resize drive

Specify the new size in MBs. In this example, we'll expand a 10GB virtual disk to 40GB:

sudo VBoxManage modifyhd XP.vdi --resize 40960

The process should complete in a few seconds.

4. Allocate new space ^†

1. Download Parted Magic
2. Open VirtualBox and select your VM
3. Go to Settings > Storage to select the Parted Magic ISO image:
   
   and then to Settings > System > Motherboard to set the boot order.
4. Start the virtual machine. Once Parted Magic is booted, double click "Partition Editor" on the Desktop. You'll see something like this:
   
5. In this example, you'd resize /dev/sda1 to take up the additional 30GB and click Apply:
   

Notes

• ^* In versions prior to 4, setvdiuuid was used instead of sethduuid
• ^† There are a number of other ways to allocate the newly-created space; Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc) in Windows, diskutil in OS X, parted in *nix, etc. Parted Magic has the advantage of being nearly universal and also working on virtual machines that will no longer boot due to low disk space.
• Image resizing was added in VirtualBox 4.0.
• While these instructions were written for an OS X host and Windows XP guest, they should be applicable in most any environment. The path to VBoxManage.exe under Windows is C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe

Mad props

• How-To: Clone or Copy a VirtualBox Virtual Disk
• How to resize a disk in VirtualBox 4.1 (ubuntu host/windows XP guest)
• How to resize a VirtualBox fixed size virtual drive (.vdi) on Mac
• Increasing disk space on VirtualBox
• Resizing a VirtualBox Virtual Hard Disk
• VirtualBox : increase hard disk size of the virtual machine

/misc | Apr 12, 2012

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