by Greg
Thu, June 09 2011 13:54
It is not uncommon to undersize your virtual drives while experimenting with various virtual machines. This can be a problem when a test machine suddenly becomes production and you find yourself with a critically undersized C: drive.
This is not a problem in VirtualBox. In version 4.0.0.8 (possibly earlier) a command line tool will let you import a VDI file from one image to another. Simply follow these steps, especially for Windows 7/Vista/2003/2008 images:
- Create a new hard disk image with the sizes and parameters the way you like.
- Run the following command from a command prompt in the VirtualBox application directory.
C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox>vboxmanage clonehd --existing
[full path to source image] [full path to newly created image]
- Change the appliance settings to use the new larger drive, discarding the smaller.
- Once booted into the VM, use Windows Disk Management Service to expand the volume and you have a more space.
