Monday, April 16, 2012

Resize VirtualBox hard disk drive

Numerous post cover how easily this can be done.

$ sudo vboxmanage modifyhd filename --resize size-in-MB

There is a catch, and I'm not sure why, but your VM may not recognize the new unallocated space if there are snapshots, so make a clone first and work with that.

Extending your partition in Windows XP is a little more work. If you are not extending the system partition, Windows XP can handle it using diskpart. Otherwise there are numerous partition managers (listed in no particular order) such as EaseUS Partition Master, Aomei Partition Assistant, Mini Tool Partition Wizard (which also has a live CD for download), and GParted Live. Here's a recent review with a few others.

All of these except the last (two, if you include Mini Tool) must be installed first. I chose GParted Live because I did not want to install any more software on my VM than necessary, and I didn't want to uninstall it either. Also it's easy enough for me to reboot my VM using any ISO image on my host. GParted Live is an ISO image of a mini Debian X11 system with Gparted, the partitioning tool. It has everything you need to manage your partitions on any platform. All of the files in the dependencies for each platform are in the ISO image.

As always there are caveats. Before you edit your partitions obviously back up any data. But you already did that by making a clone of your VM. Now defragment then run CHKDSK /f on your old volume. This is to make sure the disk sectors are properly accounted. Otherwise GParted won't know where they are and will fail. Don't worry, if this happens your disks will not be altered, and GParted tells you to do what I just said above. The rest is pretty obvious.

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