VirtualBox virtual drive actual size not increasing

Question

I have selected "dynamically allocated" mode when creating virtual drive. But it constantly has "actual size" of 10GB and does not grow to 20GB which is virtual size. Guest OS says it has no more space on drive on disk. I haven't didn't initially delete a 10GB partition then and then increased it to 20GB ( such as in this post How to increase VirtualBox virtual drive actual size?). I set it up initially to 20GB (I was following this tutorial http://www.otnblogs.com/oracle-linux-6-installation-virtualbox/). Finally when I reached point to install database it check space and it says that there is not enough space on disk.

I tried to kick it by copying several huge file (each of 4 GB) from USB to Virtual Box Guest OS (Oracle Linux 6.4 64b) but the same is happening. Virtual Box is 4.1.2 on Windows 7 64b. I checked other posts here but they all relate to increasing max size or they had a problem with setting initial max size small and then trying to increase it. Also, on host OS, Windows 7 there is more than 150GB of free space.

Is it possible to force actual size to grow to full size?

Solution

The available space in a guest will be measured against the full (virtual) size of a disk. It will not consider the current physical size on the disk of the host. In other words, for the guest OS the disk is always the maximum size.

If a Linux OS is reporting not enough space, it's likely to be the size of the partition you created.

For instance, if you created a 20GB virtual disk Linux would probably offered you a partition schema with a separated /home, so you do have the full 20GB of space but distributed on more than one partition.

Use

df -h

on Linux and check the size of your partitions.

Comments

[Marcelo]

No. VirtualBox will NOT expand your partitions. Your partitions are created with the full "virtual" size. And df shows the same independently of the location you run it. (You may have it confused with du)

[Sathish Kumar k k]

I am having virtualBox in widows 8.1 and running Ubuntu 14 as my virtual OS in C: drive with physical drive size as 888GB, where my .vdi of ubuntu resides which has virtual size 50gb and actual size 4gb with dynamically allocated storage. Now the problem is its actual size is not increasing.

[ChrisGuest]

I have the same problem. I expanded using resize & gparted. In my VM settings it says, "Virtual Size: 100Gb, Available Size: 29.66Gb", but in my Centos7.0 VM df –h gives: "/dev/mapper/centos-root 28G 26G 2.4G 92% /"