virtualbox.org

Having problems and there may be a better way to get to my desired solution.

Essentially, I have been working in Virtual PC, with a base image and a couple of differential drives. Problem, is that I ran out of space with my so called dynamic base. There isn't a way to resize the drive without imaging software, so I thought I would check out VirtualBox.

So far, VirtualBox seems much more advanced, feature wise and would like to move forward with a transition but I am hesitant to lose my base images. While, VirtualBox will load VHD, I don't think this removes my problem with the original size of the VHD. So, I thought I could use the clonehd function to create VDI files from my VHD files. Every time I have tried this it has worked flawlessly... except that VirtualBox wont add them. I get the error, "Could not get the storage format of the hard disk". I have tried basically every variation of the command. I also have tried to make the original VHD file a fixed length disk instead of a dynamic disk. This also didn't solve my problem.

Does anyone have a solution or a better way to move forward. At this point, it is time consuming enough that I suppose that I should just rebuild my base images, but that is very time consuming as well.

The problems you're facing with VPC about hard drives won't be solved with VB or switching to the VDI file format. You will get the same limitations.

So, is there an easy way to essentially image one drive to another with the built in tools?

Not really. You can try to clone the VHD to VDI, but if I remember correctly, that feature is not working properly. The only thing left is to create a VDI, mount that with the VHD in one VM and use CloneZilla or similar to clone the contents of the VHD to the VDI.

If I'm understanding correctly, you just want to increase the size of your virtual hard drive?

Here's what I do for that:

1)Make a new VHD or VDI (I prefer VHD thanks to the VHD mounting feature in Windows 7) with new desired size
2)Connect the old drive and the new one to a virtual machine.
3)Use a Gparted LiveCD or a Clonezilla LiveCD to copy the contents of the old one to the new one.
4)Use Gparted to resize filesystems as needed.

You might also need to run a startup repair on the guest, but this is the easiest method for me.