[Solved] Low Disk Space

[hiteshthappa]

Hi all

Recently i tried to install solaris on my windows machine using virtual box. While creating the solaris virtual machine it asked for the HDD and i assigned 29 GB from my USB HDD.
During solaris installation i even partitioned that 29 GB into all the 8 slices but after about 75% of installation it paused and displayed an error saying "low disk space". when i looked into this issue it i realised there was a .virtualbox named folder in my C:\ drive. Inside that that folder there was a file of about 4.33 GB. Idont know from where this file came and this file was increasing as the installation progressed.The file was named as solaris.vdi. I had to stop the installation since i cannot delete files from my C:\ drive.

I am using virtual box for the first time and dont know much about it
Please help me on this issue.

Thanks and regards
Hitesh

[mpack]

When you say "C:\" drive, do you actually mean "C:" drive? The "\" indicates the root folder, so it looked like you were saying that the ".Virtualbox" folder was created off the root folder, which would be unusual behaviour for VBox. If you simply meant that the big VDI files were being created on the C drive then that would be the normal default behaviour. You have to indicate another place in File|Preferences|General if you want the VDIs to be stored somewhere else.

You can unregister the existing VDI, move it to your preferred location, change the preferences as mentioned above, reregister the drive, reattach it to the VM. That will recover the situation.

If I were you I would give some thought to freeing up space on the C drive, if you really have only about 4GB free there then that is IMHO dangerously low. You can also get messages of this kind if the C drive is formatted with the FAT32 filesystem, which has a 4.6(decimal)GB limit on the size of any file. That you were having problems with a ~4GB file may have been coincidence, but it's worth checking. If drive C is FAT32 then it should be converted to NTFS.

Almost as serious is your statement that you can't delete files from the C drive. I believe you need administrator privileges to install VBox.

[hiteshthappa]

Hi

Yes by C:\ i mean C: drive. I wiil try to move VDI to some other location. But can you tell me whehter there is a differnece between VDI and the 29GB of space from USB HDD i assigned. Isn't VDI a virtual HDD we show to the operating system.

Can you direct me to me some documents or sites where i can find information about virtual box. I know nothing about it.

[mpack]

Well, that brings up more questions: how exactly did you go about "assigning" 29GB from a particular drive to a VBox VM? You obviously didn't do it via the preferences route since I had to tell you about that. VBox would have let you select 29GB as the size of a virtual drive, but I don't know what would have made you think this was going to be allocated on the USB drive. I have an ugly suspicion that you allocated a raw partition on the drive...

As to what a VDI is, it is the native format used by VBox to represent virtual hard disks. A virtual hard disk is a host file containing a complete guest filesystem, similar to how an .ISO file contains a representation of a physical CD.

On reading material: this is the offical site for VBox and hence for the best information about VBox. You should also thoroughly read the user manual for the product, located in \Program Files\Sun\xVM VirtualBox\Doc. Also useful are the various readmes and howtos in the various forums on this site.

[hiteshthappa]

Hi

I assigned a whole drive of 29 GB and it was not a raw partition i was a empty NTFS partition on my USB HDD.

When asked to create a virtual disk in virtual disk wizard i gave the path of the drive and it was N: in my case and after all this was done, the insatallation started and during solaris installation it showed me that drive as c0d0 and was exactly 29GB and i partitioned it into 7 slices.

[mpack]

If you tell VBox to create a virtual drive which is 29GB in size then (although I'm not familiar with Solaris), then no matter where this space is allocated on the host, or how much space is taken on the host, I expect this would always appear inside Solaris as drive c0d0 of size 29GB, so this isn't really diagnostic of anything.

What I'm trying to get at is what made you think you had allocated space for the guest on a specific host drive. You obviously didn't point VBox to that drive otherwise VBox would have created it there... and I can't really think of what other interface might have confused you.

Oh well, there's no point in worrying about it now. The important point to remember (and I'm deliberately simplifying here) is that you do not assign host partitions to a guest. Guest and host should be thought of as separate PCs, hence guest drive letters will be totally unrelated to host drive letters. Guest drives are represented on the host as simple files, not entire partitions, and these files will typically be far smaller than the allocated size (e.g. your simulated 29GB drive probably only occupies a few GB at most on the host, since the host file need not preserve the unused spaces on the guests virtual drive). If you like, you could imagine that the host file represents a compressed drive image, so there is no need to allocate 29GB on the host just because the guest sees a 29GB drive.

[hiteshthappa]

Thanks for your replies.

I did the installation again and this time carefully assigned the VDI from my UDB HDD and my solaris is up and running.

Thanks again.