Increase the partition size

[sillit]

I must be doing something dumb but I've had a look around the FAQs and I can't see anything obvious so I figured I would ask here and hope some kind soul puts me out of my misery.

I'm running Win7 guest on a Linux host (CentOS 5) and I'm trying to resize my Win7 installation from 10GB to 30GB.

1. With my existing Win7 guest offline, I used VBoxManage to clone the hard drive (from "Win7" to "Win7-clone")

2. I created a new VM and check that I can boot up from "Win7-clone" (I could).

3. I booted up in the original Win7 client and used CloneVDI to resize the "Win7-clone" to "Win7-clone-expanded" (seems to be successful)

4. I changed the settings that work with "Win7-clone" (step 2) to specify "Win7-clone-expanded" as the IDE Primary Master

5. I booted up from the new "Win7-clone-expanded" and receive a "FATAL: No bootable medium found! System halted."

6. I re-read http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic. ... 669#p33945 and figured I need to repartition and fiddle with MBR (!)

7. I re-booted "Win7-clone-expanded" using gparted-live

8. GParted tells me that the 30GB drive is unallocated and it can't do anything until it creates a partition table, however creating a partition table will erase all data...

9. I signed up to this forum and started hassling you guys.

Any ideas on where I'm going wrong?

[Perryg]

I moved your post out of the CloneVDI section as it has nothing to do with mpack's CloneVDI tool. Please read the topic closer before posting in them.

You need to read up on Gparted and if you decide to use mpacks CloneVDI tool you can run in on Linux via Wine.

[sillit]

Thanks for your help. The reason I posted this within the CloneVDI topic was because, as far as I could tell, Gparted couldn't do anything with the hard drive image that CloneVDI had created. Apologies if I got that wrong - Gparted was reporting the disk that CloneVDI created as unallocated space and would only let me create a partition table (and in doing so, erase all the data that existed on the drive).

I couldn't see any obvious docs that seemed to address this issue (on VBox FAQ, Gparted docs or CloneVDI release notes) but I would be very happy if someone could correct me and point me towards docs that would help remedy / explain where I went wrong?

Thanks in advance,

Ian

[Perryg]

Perhaps the easiest way to increase the size of the VM is to install CloneVDI Tool in wine on a Linux host. You then clone the guest and select to increase the size of the partition at the same time. Other than that you would need to read here Tutorial: All about VDI's where it discusses how to increase the size of the partition.

[sillit]

Thanks for looking into this. I'm now at the stage where I've spent far more time trying to get this to work than it would take to just start from scratch. However I'll respond in case anyone else finds themselves in a similar situation:

Perhaps the easiest way to increase the size of the VM is to install CloneVDI Tool in wine on a Linux host.

I'm running CentOS-5 as my VBox host and wine support seems pretty flaky, hence why I was trying to do this in a Windows VM that I already had setup. Is there any fundamental reason why running CloneVDI on VM "A" to clone / resize / repartition VDI "B" to VDI "C" (in shared folders) should cause any problems?

If not, would you expect to be able to boot directly off the cloned / resized / repartitioned VDI "C" without any extra steps? (the docs gave me the impression that I would be able to do this, but I couldn't).

You then clone the guest and select to increase the size of the partition at the same time.

Yup, this is exactly what I tried first but I found I couldn't boot off the newly created VDI. I then tried using CloneVDI to clone / resize but without the repartition option, then use Gparted to see if that would work. I also tried booting off Windows 7 Recovery Disk (in both cases) to try to get that to fix MBR record problems, but to no avail. In every case the VM fails to boot up.

Other than that you would need to read here Tutorial: All about VDI's where it discusses how to increase the size of the partition.

Yup, I have read this. I'm guessing that plenty of people will have done exactly what I'm trying to do, so I'm pretty sure I must be missing something obvious. However I've read the FAQs and I'm still not sure, so at the very least I might be able to help provide some extra documentation.

Thanks again for your time

[mpack]

People have been known to have problems using CloneVDI's built in repartition feature on NTFS partitions, but using CloneVDI just to increase the disk size, and then using gparted to increase the partition to fit - always works. If it doesn't work for you then you have some other problem, eg. with I/O to shared folders which has nothing to do with CloneVDI.