Dynamic VDI growing size not recognized by guest Ubuntu OS??

[vb_newbie]

Hi everyone,
I am using dynamic vdi (SATA) and running Ubuntu 10.04 as guest over it. I had set its maximum size to 1TB and the size now is around 4GB. However, Ubuntu is giving me a disk full error and not allowing login access. df showed '/' as 100% full.

Code: Select all

obilgenie@ubuntu:~/Projects$ VBoxManage showhdinfo /home/mobilgenie/.VirtualBox/Harddisks/Movie_Box_dev.vdi 
Oracle VM VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 3.2.10
(C) 2005-2010 Oracle Corporation
All rights reserved.

UUID:                 43f4acca-2519-45f6-9055-66365483db9c
Accessible:           yes
Logical size:         1048576 MBytes
Current size on disk: 4266 MBytes
Type:                 normal (base)
Storage format:       VDI
In use by VMs:        MindLeap_Ubuntu_dev (UUID: 4c374af8-8ba7-4537-b513-81175e570e80)
Location:             /home/mobilgenie/.VirtualBox/Harddisks/Movie_Box_dev.vdi

I had used VBoxManage clonehdi to create this expanded disk from an existing 4GB one.
1. Any ideas to get this to work the way I expected this to work (if I copy, create new files and directories, disk size will continue to expand till the maximum size is reached)??
2. If I share a host folder on /home, would that that count to the Ubuntu / size? If so, how can I prevent/work around that limitation?

Thanks

[mpack]

The showhdinfo output you have provided is not relevant to the error message you are reporting. Showhdinfo tells you what VirtualBox thinks about the virtual drive hardware. The error message you are seeing is what the guest OS thinks about the "soft" features of the drive, i.e. the partition map and the filesystem being used within a partition - these are things that VirtualBox knows and cares nothing about.

Btw: "dynamic growing size" does not need to be "recognized" by Ubuntu or by any other OS, as it's purely an expression of how host resources are used (i.e. all at once or only on demand). The guest always sees a fixed (maximum) sized drive regardless.

Almost certainly what has happened is that after creating the drive, you created a small root partitition inside the guest. That partition is now nearly full. Since you evidently have plenty of drive space available you should be able to enlarge partition using a partitioning tool (such as the gparted live cd ISO) run inside the guest VM.