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?

Answer 1

Adding a second drive is probably easiest. That would only take a few minutes, and it wouldn't require any configuration, really.

Alternatively, you could create the second, bigger drive, then run a disk imaging utility to copy all data on disk1 to disk2. That certainly shouldn't take a few hours, but it would take longer than just living with two drives.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

The problem is that the file system on that disk was created when the disk had a certain geometry and you must modify it (while your OS is running on it).

So yes, making the virtual hard disk bigger is not a big issue. The issue is to make the new space available to your OS. To do that, you need tools like parted (Linux) or Partition Magic (Windows).

Answer 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

Answer 5

Taked from here => forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?p=41118#p41118

You could try something like this (see also Tutorial - All about VDIs: How can I resize the partitions inside my VDI?):

• Create a new VDI of the desired size.
• Boot GParted Live in a VM with both old and new VDIs attached.
• Check in the partition editor (opened automatically after booting) what your old and new disk locations are. (It'll be something like /dev/hda and /dev/hdb.)

• Copy contents from old to new disk. This will take a fair amount of time. (Here /dev/hdX is your original disk and /dev/hdY the new one).

  dd if=/dev/hdX of=/dev/hdY

  Warning: Make sure you do not mix up your input and output disks or you'll wipe all information from your original disk! (if= specifies the input and of= specifies the output.)

• Reboot (again with GParted-Live). Now you should be able to increase the Windows partition size on the new disk.

Once you've verified the larger VDI boots Windows fine (and disk size is as you'd expect) you can of course delete the old smaller VDI.

Edit: Instead of rebooting before you resize the partition you should be able to run partprobe and the hit CTRL+R in GParted instead.