Resizing virtualbox vdi doesn’t work

hard drivevdivirtualbox

I tried resizing my VirtualBox disk (.vdi) with VBoxManage, but it didn't resize the hard drive. The command while in the root folder of VirtualBox was:

VBoxManage modifyhd "C:\Users\<name>\VirtualBox Vms\Linux Mint 14.1\Linux Mint 14.vdi" --resize 30000.

The output showed 0%…20%….40%…100% looking like it was successful. Now my .vdi in VirtualBox shows the virtual size as being 29.30gb, but the actual size is still 7.90gb. When I boot into Linux Mint, it still notifies me that the hard drive is out of space.

Best Answer

Your hard drive is bigger, but you still have your old small partition on it. Use some partitioning software (for example GParted) to resize the partition.

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OK, turns out that modifyhd --resize does not work as expected if the VM to be resized uses snapshots. A user is supposed to know that in this case modifyhd --resize is to be run against the latest snapshot, not the original VDI file. Something that isn't mentioned in the docs and that doesn't strike me as being obvious either. Two days lost, sigh.

How to clone a hard drive directly to a vdi image

You can directly create an image with VBoxManage convertfromraw. First unmount the device, then:

VBoxManage convertfromraw /dev/sda MyImage.vdi --format VDI

Replace /dev/sda with whatever disk or partition you want to clone.

You may need to do this as root to gain access to the device. If so, then you should change ownership of the finished image.

Best Answer

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How to clone a hard drive directly to a vdi image

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