I needed more space in my WinXP VM, and here’s how I increased it’s disk size.
Currently (VirtualBox 3.0.6) there is no feature to resize .vdi images. But there is a workaround for that. You can increase the space available for your VM using these steps:
- Create a new temporary virtual disk (with the size of your data on VM) and attach it to the VM
- Boot to your VM and install a disk-cloning software (e.g. for Windows there is Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost), use it to create a backup/clone image file on the attached temporary disk.
- Create a third virtual disk with the size you would like to have for your VM
- Detach your original virtual disk from your VM, attach the new bigger disk and the temporary disk (that has the backup/clone image) to your VM
- Use Recovery disk (of the disk-cloning software you used in step 2) to boot to your VM (actually, you can mount it’s image) and use restore function to restore your files to the new larger disk.
- Detach temporary disk and unmount the recovery disk.
You should have your VM with the larger disk now. Check if everything is working OK, and delete the temporary and old disk images.
This is just an example which worked perfectly for me, I believe you can achieve this using other clone/backup tools and maybe even w/o using the temporary virtual disk. Have fun!
