virtualbox.org

Host OS: Ubuntu Feisty Fawn.

Guest OS: Windows XP.

Following advice in the ubuntu forums, I resized the Windows vdi by (a) creating a new virtual drive within VirtualBox, (b) designating it as a primary slave, (c) booting up the guest system with the clonezilla (http://clonezilla.org/) iso and then (d) cloning the old harddisk to the new one within the guest. Finally, I removed the old vdi from VirtualBox and set the slave to master.

All this worked fine. I can boot up from the new vdi without problems. BUT: while VirtualBox displays the size of the new disk correctly (20GB), the Windows guest OS still reports the old size (10GB).

Clonezilla has an option where the old disk is adapted to the size of the target disk, which I selected.

I had created the 20GB virtual disk not as fixed, but with dynamic size. Could this be the source of this weird problem?

It's likely that the partition table isn't changed. Check the Disk Manager (right click My Computer > Manage > Disk Manager) to find out how big the virtual drive actually is. You can then use GParted, or any other random Linux LiveCD enviroment with GParted (most of them have) to increase the partition size.

Well it's nice that cloned xp guest os booted, aka your clonezilla worked.

I attempted at least 7 times last night doing what you did...but still ended up with a unbootable system. Even after booting xp iso and doing a fixboot, or a fixmbr ended up getting no where. I've got fed up of search for cloning..

'A disk read error occured'
'Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart'

I'm trying to go from a 2GB to a 25GB vdi

What version of clonezilla (I'm on 1-2-1.37) did you use?
What version of Virtual box ( I'm on 2.1.2 (ubuntu intrepid))

http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic. ... clonezilla

Thanks, Sasquatch! I booted into the system with the latest gparted iso, and resized the ntfs partition. That was the missing step.

I don't know which version of clonezilla I used, but I'm using VirtualBox 2.0.6 on Ubuntu Intrepid.

Well that's kinda interesting, I swear that I've cloned an XP system using clonezilla as well in the past. The only thing I can think of was I used the wrong settings or I went for the same drive type. I sure would like to use clonezilla but I just got fed up of trying different clonezilla versions and permutations of flags settings etc..

I fought this all day and finally got it to work. However, I wasn't trying to resize the partition. I was just backing up VDI disk to image (via SSH) and then restoring image to newly created disk image of the same size.

BACKUP
Booted CZ ISO using the Win XP VM I wanted to clone.
Selected Disk to Image
Selected all default options except:
-z0 No compression

RESTORE
Created new VDI as a "Fixed Size Storage"
Added to new VDI to VM as slave drive
Boot CZ ISO
Restore Image to Disk using hdb1
Selected all default options except:
-t1 client restores the prebuilt MBR from syslinux
-j0 (on the next screen) use DD to create the partition
Restore completed
Stopped CZ
Removed Master vdi, switched slave vdi to master partition
Configure CD to not load CZ iso
Boot VM

I have a suspicion it's the -j0 that made it work for me. This may or may not work when attempting to resize the disk image but since I received the same error and did find a work around, I thought it was worth posting.