How can I easily add storage to a VirtualBox machine with XP installed?

Question

When I installed Windows XP on a VirtualBox machine, I made the hard drive only 10 GB since and assumed it would expand in size (as do hard drives in VMWare as far as I can remember, isn't this true?).

In any case, I'm trying to install Visual Studio 2010 beta on this Virtual Box XP image and it has run out of disk space.

Googling for an answer, I'm finding complicated tutorials like this which show you how to increase the size of a VirtualBox hard drive "in just a couple hours".

But I can't imagine it would be that hard to either:

• increase the size of a virtual disk (after all, it is virtual)
• create a new hard drive of, say, 20 GB and just attach it in the virtual machine as the D: or E: drive

How can I easily add storage space to a VirtualBox machine with XP installed?

Solution 1

I found this nugget at the link following. It worked perfect for me and only took 5 seconds.

As of VirtualBox 4 they added support for expansion.

VBoxManage modifyhd filename.vdi --resize 46080

That will resize a virtual disk image to 45GB.

https://superuser.com/questions/172651/increasing-disk-space-on-virtualbox

Solution 2

Note: This applies to pre-4 VirtualBox. In VB4, HDD expansion has been introduced.

According to the VirtualBox documentation:

When creating an image, its size needs to be specified, which determines this fixed geometry. It is therefore not possible to change the size of the virtual hard disk later.

So, the easiest way to add additional space to an existing VM is to attach a second hard disk. Go to the VM Settings > Hard Disks > Add New. Then, click the "Select Hard Drive" button and click on "New". Follow the wizard to create a new virtual hard disk. It will then show up as D: or E: in your guest OS.

Solution 3

For Windows users there's an additional user friendly option: CloneVDI Tool by mpack. It's a GUI front-end to VBoxManage that makes things a little easier to work with.

http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=22422

As Alexander M. mentioned, you'll still have to use GParted, Partition Magic or a similar partition editor to grow your partition to the newly allocated physical drive. To do this just download the GParted iso, mount it as a bootable drive in the VirtualBox and boot from it.

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php

Solution 4

Newer versions of VirtualBox add an option for VBoxManage clonehd that allows you to clone to an existing (larger) virtual disk.

The process is detailed here: Expanding VirtualBox Dynamic VDIs

Solution 5

Step 1 : create new virtual disk as per @mhaller instruction

Step 2 : Open Run dialog box type diskmgmt.msc and enter

Step 3 : Select uninitialized partition, right click->initialize

Step 4 : Select the partition again, right click and create extended partition, again right click create logical drive (adjust the partition size if you need in wizard)

Thats all

View more solutions

Comments

[Alexander Malakhov]

Now it's simpler. Use: VBoxManage modifihd your_virt_machine.vdi --resize 20480

[Alexander Malakhov]

Note that after resizing (whether with midifyhd or with clonehd), you will have to resize HD partition inside guest OS as well

[Alexander Malakhov]

There is straight way, see Josh Wright's answer and comments

[Tom Bushell]

Note that at least up to v. 4.1.8, this will only work for dynamic disk images.

[Tom Bushell]

CloneVDI now has a checkbox on the main screen to also increase the partition size. However, this did not work on my fixed size image, and neither did GParted. I guess the lesson here is to use dynamic disk images with VirtualBox.

[my account_ram]

Worked perfectly - Thanks !!

[kevinmicke]

CloneVDI worked perfectly for me to also increase the partition size with dynamic disks.

[Adri C.S.]

The tool worked fine for me, but I had to manually resize the partition with GParted.

[MestreLion]

Just a clarification: MiB is not the same as MB! 1 KB = 1000 bytes, and 1 KiB = 1024 bytes. So while 1 MB = 1 million bytes (1000*1000), 1 MiB = 1024*1024 = 1048576 bytes.

[mehov]

Note: stackoverflow.com/questions/1688690/…

[Nilesh Rajani]

After resizing disk, you need to resize partition as well. Quick tutorial for that support.microsoft.com/en-in/help/325590/…

[thecheech]

Like @NileshRajani said. If you are on Win10 go to Disk Management to extend volume.