need help with virtualbox

[andydch]

my virtualbox harddisk is getting lower of space so how to resize the harddisk?

thanks

[DrHu]

Did you use a dynamic disk (an expanding file) or did you use a fixed hard drive partition ?
--if it was an expandable file, it would increase to the size needed, as long as the host OS had enough space.

[andydch]

i used a dynamic disc
would it increase the space automatically? because my winXP as guest host always display low space warning.

thanks

[DrHu]

i used a dynamic disc would it increase the space automatically? because my winXP as guest host always display low space warning.thanks

More context needed: which windows OS, which format for the windows partition, which hard drive capacity for the windows host OS..
--see the above points, but essentially if you have ntfs as the windows host OS format, and you had a reasonable hard drive capacity, you should be OK.

Yes it does expand automatically to accommodate the VM space being used,

Quoting myself..
--if it was an expandable file, it would increase to the size needed, as long as the host OS had enough space.

If the host OS has space available, then the file size of the VM (virtualbox) will not exceed what is available for it to use
--if you are actually running out of hard drive space on your host OS, you will have to deal with that issue, cleanup windows or get more hard drive space (buy a bigger hard drive ?) and so on..

[altair4]

Dynamic disks will increase in size automatically as needed up to the limit you specified. At that point it wouldn't matter if you originally created a dynamic or fixed-size disk.

Maybe using VBoxManage clonevdi would do it. Sorry, but I've never done that myself so I can't give yo a step-by-step.

[DrHu]

Dynamic disks will increase in size automatically as needed up to the limit you specified. At that point it wouldn't matter if you originally created a dynamic or fixed-size disk.

I forgot about that, I picked a reasonable size of 10GB (virtual disk size) for the winXp expanding disk, and right now having just checked I see I am using 1.23GB

For the OP..
For virtualbox, check the settings for that VM (Linux) hard drives..
--you can also check the help to see how to manage that virtual hard drive space; you can add copy, remove space..

http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=585
http://virtualdebian.blogspot.com/2008/ ... -disk.html
One method:

• Save your VM files
• Create a new VM hard drive space (larger if needed than the current virtual file size),
• Use those VM files again, and boot the VM machine

--but I would read their help first, before doing anything..

http://paulsiu.wordpress.com/category/v ... irtualbox/
--another more advanced planing method of using virtual disks

• In addition, we will create a much larger drive than we need. Once created, you cannot extend a virtual disk volume. You have to create a new volume and copy the content over to the new volume. We will solve this problem by creating a really large volume like 200 Gb. Because we will be using dynamic size disk, the initial disk will be quite small.

That's the difference between a fixed size and a an expanding disk (dynamic ) disk, the dynamic disk starts small and expands to the full size, the fixed space size starts at the full size you have selected..
--and is the reason, I always use a dynamic disk

[altair4]

You might want to look at this for a possible way out:

How to Resize Hard Drive in VirtualBox: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=634880
Look at post #3 in that forum

The concept is to create a new larger vdi, use clonezilla to image the current vdi ( including grub ), then restore the image to the larger vdi. Never done this either

[andydch]

Thank you very much for so many advices.....
I will learn and then try them......