Add Disk Space to Win7 Guest on Linux Host

[tronayne]

I have 64-bit Win7 installed as a guest on Slackware 64-bit 13.37. I have a 92G partition mounted as /var/lib/virtual than contains WinXP and Winy7 with 62G free; it's a SATA drive and it's telling me that SATA Port 0 is Win7.vdi (Normal, 20.00 GB) -- I though I installed Win7 as dynamic so it would grow as necessary but that doesn't seem to be happening; i.e., it ain't growing and I'm running out of disk space in Win7.

So, I've dug around a little but I can't seem to figure out if I can "turn on" dynamic disk expansion (or whatever it's called) or simply add, say, 20G to the Win7 virtual machine.

I should mention that I'm running VirtualBox 4.1.4 with the extensions and tools installed.

Any advice on how to do either of those (and, maybe, which would be the better bet)?

Thanks.

[Sasquatch]

Looks like you never read the User Manual properly. It clearly notes in the disk types that dynamic is made to be small in the beginning and it grows to the set limit. So if you create a VDI of 20 GB, you start with a file of only a few KB that can grow to a max of 20 GB. If you create a VDI of 200 GB, you get the same, max size is 200 GB, initial size a few KB. Using fixed means that the whole 20 GB or 200 GB is allocated upon creation and takes a lot longer to create, because it's filled with zeros first to allocate all the space on the Host file system.

While you're in the manual, check out the chapter that describes the VBoxManage options. There's a modifyhd section that you should read. It describes how to increase the size of dynamic VDIs. Make a backup first, in case something goes wrong. After that, boot the VM, open the Guest's disk management and increase the size of the partition. If you have snapshots, the change won't work and you have to remove the snapshots first.

[tronayne]

Oops! You're right, I did miss the VBoxMange section... but, while I was out, I found it and did:

VBoxManage modifyhd /var/lib/virtual/Machines/Win7/Win7.vdi --resize 40960

That took it to 40G.

Now all I have to figure out is how to tell Win7 that it's got 40G instead 20G (and I am most definitely not a Windows person) so I'm digging around in Win7 for how to tell it that 40G is available.

Thanks for the input.

[tronayne]

Found it, expanded the drive, now have 40G.

All is well that ends.

Thank you for your help.