virtualbox.org

After some playing around I found a nice solution for enlarging a disk without any crazy program. I will give a short description, but be reminded that a minimality of linux experience is necessary. The description below is detailed in the sense that several steps could be merged, but I didn't mind doing it one by one.

• create a new disk the size you want
• attach it to the same controller (as primary slave or secondary slave). Do not use a different harddisk controller for that
• get System Rescue CD
• mount that CD image
• boot into the CD
• now you should have /dev/sda1 your old disk, and /dev/sdb
• use fdisk /dev/sdb and create a new partition on the full disk of type 7 (NTFS)
• use ntfsclone to copy all your data from /dev/sda1 to /dev/sdb1 by calling
ntfsclone --overwrite /dev/sdb1 /dev/sda1 mind that this can destroy your old disk if you get it wrong, ie if you reverse source and target!
• try if the new sdb1 can be mounted with ntfs-3g /dev/sdb1 foobar (where foobar is some directory)
• turn off the machine
• detach the old disk and attach the new disk to the primary master
• boot again into the system rescue cd
• install a boot loader with install-mbr /dev/sda --enable 1A --partition 1 --timeout 9
• make ntfs bootable again by calling ntfsreloc /dev/sda1
• shut down your computer
• unmount the cdrom drive
• boot again, now you should boot into Windows as usual, also with the usual size of the disk
• shut down
• mount the System Rescue CD again and boot into it
• call ntfsresize -n /dev/sda1 that will make a test run. If that worked call ntfsresize /dev/sda1 which will resize your ntfs volume to the full partition size
• turn off the computer, unmount the CD image, and boot again
• wait until Windows has checked the filesystem

Now the new disk should be running. This is the way I did it in the last few ours.

If you have any comments let me know.

Norbert