Increasing disk space on VirtualBox

Question

Is there an easy way to increase virtual hard disk space on VirtualBox?

Answer 1

There is not an easy way to do this.

There is a complicated one, though:

http://www.my-guides.net/en/content/view/122/26/

Has a good screenshot-by-screenshot guide. Essentially you're copying your install onto a new virtual-disk file.

Update: As of VirtualBox 4 they added support for expansion.

VBoxManage modifyhd filename.vdi --resize 46080

That will resize a virtual disk image to 45GB.

Answer 2

The Trivial Proof blog has a nice tutorial of the process for VirtualBox versions before and after 4.0. It includes the steps for adjusting the partition on the expanded disk.

Answer 3

This worked perfectly (from Windows 7 and using VirtualBox 4.x).

Do the following:

1. Open cmd as administrator.
2. Go to the folder where the VirtualBox is installed so you can use the VBoxManage program.

3. From there, run the following command:

   VBoxManage modifyhd <file path and name> --resize <size in MB>
   

   e.g.: VBoxManage modifyhd C:\V-MACHINES\SERVER2008\WIN-2008.VDI --resize 26000

4. You will see a message from 0 to 100% and done.
5. Start your machine and go to "Computer" (or "My Computer", if applicable), right click and select "Manage", go to "Storage" → "Disk Management", right click on the disk you want to expand, click on "Extend Volume" and resize the disk as you wish.
6. If necessary restart the VM.

Answer 4

If you are running Windows Server 2012 and VirtualBox version 4 and above, there are only 4 steps:

1. run the "C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe" clonehd .vdi --resize
2. Boot Up Virtual Box
3. In server managaer -->File And Storage Services --> Volumes --> Disks --> Tasks --> Rescan Storage
4. Go to server manager -->File And Storage Services --> Volumes --> Right click on volume --> choose expand volume.

Go to file explorer and right click on the drive. You will seethat the volume has increased in size!!

Answer 5

Had to search a bit on how to run this command.

Navigate to folder having your-filename.vdi e.g:(cd /Users/binoy/VirtualBox\ VMs/)

Then run the command to increase the space to 25 gb.

VBoxManage modifyhd filename.vdi --resize 25000

You would now have to attach the additional space using resize2fs or Gparted.

Answer 6

Lets see the currently existing virtual hard drives of your virtual box(es) using the vboxmanage command

$ vboxmanage list hdds

In my case it lists only this one

UUID:           db753df8-de41-425b-b452-fab84f1f8b71
Parent UUID:    base
State:          created
Type:           normal (base)
Location:       /home/anonyn/WIN81_64BITS.vdi
Storage format: VDI
Capacity:       39891 MBytes
Encryption:     disabled

Keep the location of the VDI file you want to resize /home/anonyn/WIN81_64BITS.vdi

Lets determine how much physical space is left on your real machine (Linux)

$ df -h

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            3,9G     0  3,9G   0% /dev
tmpfs           791M  1,4M  790M   1% /run
/dev/sda2       110G   29G   76G  28% /
tmpfs           3,9G   62M  3,8G   2% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5,0M  4,0K  5,0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs           3,9G     0  3,9G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda1        38M   512   38M   1% /boot/efi
tmpfs           791M   28K  791M   1% /run/user/1000

Since in my case I have 76GB free on /dev/sda2 I can increase that WIN81_64BITS.vdi it by 36GB without any issues

Some simple math will allow you to get the desired new size

[CurrentSizeFrom first command] + [SizeToIncrease in MBytes too]
39891 MBytes + 36*1024 MBytes
39891 MB + 36864 MB = 76755 MB [NewSizeInMB]

Now you are ready to build the command that will help you solve the problem

VBoxManage modifyhd [path/To/File.vdi] --resize [NewSizeInMB]

$ VBoxManage modifyhd /home/anonyn/WIN81_64BITS.vdi --resize 76755

$ VBoxManage modifyhd /home/anonyn/WIN81_64BITS.vdi --resize 76755 0%...10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%...100%

Now boot that virtual machine and extend the desired partition following this steps

Answer 7

There's also now a simple GUI too called Clone VDI for Windows users that @Eric Kigathi mentioned here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/5987875/1024735