Resizing virtualbox vdi doesn't work

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.

Mark Matlock

Posted 2013-02-19T19:52:17.930

Reputation: 61

Answers

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.

gronostaj

Posted 2013-02-19T19:52:17.930

Reputation: 33 047

1I booted into GParted, but wasn't able to increase the partition's storage - only decrease the size. – Mark Matlock – 2013-02-20T01:21:21.160

I have the same exact problem. Any solutions to this? – Teodor Talov – 2013-06-02T20:15:02.233

According to this forum thread on virtualbox's own web page, this will not work if you have snapshots in your configuration.

Unfortunantly the only known solution to this is to merge all the snapshots into base and then do the resize afterwards on the base .vdi file.

And then you have to use tools in linux to expand your partition(s) over the newly emerged hard disk space. GParted or other linux expanding tools should do the job here.

Tobibobi

Posted 2013-02-19T19:52:17.930

Reputation: 26