External hard drive

[dcneuro]

How do I increase the size of the hard drive designated once I created it and added software? I made it too small and it is full.

[Perryg]

See Chapter 8.22 VBoxManage modifyhd in your VirtualBox users manual and then use Gparted to increase the primary partition.

[dcneuro]

Holy cow. I have no idea what that means. Where is this command entered? where do I find Gparted?

[mpack]

Read about "VBoxManage modifyhd --resize" in your VirtualBox user manual. The gparted live CD iso is a free tool you can download from here.

[dcneuro]

8.22 does not discuss Gparted. The entire manual does not mention it. 8.22 discusses file commands only, with which I have no familiarity. I am downloading it currently from the link you provided. I am installing and running this on the mac side?

[dcneuro]

I downloaded Gpartition, It appears to be nothing more than folders and files. No idea what I am to to with this.

[mpack]

"VBoxManage modifyhd --resize" is how you change the size virtual disk hardware - equivalent to adding additional platters to an existing disk drive, as if that were possible.

However, adding extra disk space does not affect the data that is already on the disk, and included in that data is fields telling the guest OS how much disk space it is allowed to use (a.k.a. the partition size), so...

Next thing you do is download the gparted partition manager from the link I gave earlier. This is an ISO image of a bootable/live CD - meaning that you mount the ISO in the VM and boot from it, then follow the on screen instructions to change the partition size on your VMs system drive to fill the enlarged drive - assuming that is what you want to do.

ps. I could possibly answer your questions more accurately if I could believe your profile. At the time of writing your profile says that your guest is "OS Lion" and your host is XP. I'm assuming that you have this reversed, given which forum you are posting in. In this thread you have not explicitly said what the guest is, AFAICS.

[dcneuro]

Yes, that is backwards. I am running Mac OS as the host, and VB as a guest for the sole purpose of running windows XP. I set the hard disc allocation to 10 gig on setup, which apparently in retrospect was not large enough. In Parallels, which is currently not working due to the recent Lion update, you just close the VN and increase the partition side from with the conig settings.

[dcneuro]

I have not been able to successfully figure out how Gparted works.

I do see in section 8.2 of the manual it specifically states:

For example, if you originally created a 10G disk which is now full, you can use the --"resize 15360" command to add 5 GByte more space to the virtual disk without having to create a new image and copy all data from within a virtual machine.

So where do I type that command to increase the partition size?

[mpack]

You will not be able to figure out how gparted works by reading the VirtualBox user manual! Gparted is a third party (Gnu) tool. Really, gparted is very simple to use, but if you really find it that hard then you can google for info.