Increase size of a vdi

[longtom]

Hi,

Is it at all possible to increase the size of a vdi? I doubt it...

Next one. What is the most painless way to migrate a virtual OS (Ubuntu) to a bigger vdi.

Please advise. Any suggestions welcome.

[oraerk]

A VDI capacity is fixed. Once created, a VDI cannot be extended to a greater capacity. The work around is to create a new VDI and use 3rd party disk cloning tool to replicate the content of the initial VDI.

On how to do it, please explore:
http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=15456#p64620
http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=8580#p70743

Did it myself by the following guide http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?p=65211#p65211 . Worked.

[longtom]

A VDI capacity is fixed. Once created, a VDI cannot be extended to a greater capacity. The work around is to create a new VDI and use 3rd party disk cloning tool to replicate the content of the initial VDI.

On how to do it, please explore:
http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=15456#p64620
http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=8580#p70743

Did it myself by the following guide http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?p=65211#p65211 . Worked.

Thank you. This appears to be working well - up to the part I need to resize the partition.
I am in gparted, I have a 10GB unpartitioned space but somehow my cloned ext3 doesn't want to extent.

Any ideas?

[howefield]

The above is good advice, another option would be to create a second disk and slave it to the original. Add it as a second drive in your virtual machine settings.

[oraerk]

Thank you. This appears to be working well - up to the part I need to resize the partition.
I am in gparted, I have a 10GB unpartitioned space but somehow my cloned ext3 doesn't want to extent.

Any ideas?
My guess you are on the stage of resizing cloned vdi with gparted, right? I had not faced problems on that stage, please post what does gparted say.

[longtom]

My guess you are on the stage of resizing cloned vdi with gparted, right? I had not faced problems on that stage, please post what does gparted say.

That's correct. However, I used a dynamically expanding virtual hdd. I'll try it as I write with a fixed one. If that doesn't work I'll post the screen shots and an explanation in detail of what is not working.

Thanks for your response.

[longtom]

Didn't work. Her it goes:

On screenshot1 you see my virtual hdd with my partitions on it. I would like to extend hdb1 using the unpartitioned space of 10GB to do so.

When I select hdb1 and press "resize", the following screen pops up and I am not able to resize the partition, as it appears to be at its maximum size...

What am I doing wrong?

[longtom]

Here we are - community did it again.

On the za irc channel somebody gave me some partition basics I wasn't aware of.

So I deleted all partitions (incl swap) but the cloned ext3 partition. No I could extend that partition, which was so stubborn, quite nicely. Left enough space to recreate swap afterwards, did that - Bob's your uncle.

Anything is easy - if you know what to do...

Just wrote above for the benefit of google. This problem is SOLVED. Thanks to oraerk for pointing me into the correct direction!