Disk size issues

[b-ran]

First off let me state my set up. I have virtualbox with snow leopard host, and windows xp guest. The guest system is on my 320g external hard drive. I have it set up as a hdd parallel. When I initially set it up I had it set to 100g dynamically allocated. Figuring it would give me plenty of room for what I wanted it for. I only have 4gs on it, and it's telling me that I'm out of space. I looked at the storage and it says 100gs virtual and 4gs actual. Why is it only giving me 4gs and how do I fix this issue. I have important stuff I need, but every time I start up the guest ox virtuabox pauses saying im out of room.

[mpack]

Your external hard disk is probably FAT32 formatted. The FAT32 filesystem has a maximum file size of 4GB, so you need to be using a more modern filesystem. I'm not a Mac user so I can't tell you if the Mac allows you to use HFS+ on a removable drive.

One clunky option is to clone the drive to the "Split2G" variant of VMDK, in which the drive image will be implemented as a series of 2GB extents.

[michaln]

I'm not a Mac user so I can't tell you if the Mac allows you to use HFS+ on a removable drive.

Of course it does. It can boot from external disks easily, too, unlike Windows.

[b-ran]

Yeah my external is formatted as fat32 I thought windows had to have that format. I must have misread something some where. What format does a windows hard drive usual use, Is that the HFS+ that you mentioned? And if you don't find could you elaborate on how to do the split2g clone? Thanks.

[mpack]

We are not talking about a Windows hard drive. We are talking about the 320GB portable drive which you have connected to your Mac host. That drive needs to be reformatted or converted to a filesystem which your Mac host supports and which can handle files considerably larger than 4GB.

Once the host drive is reformatted you should be able to copy the VM files back onto it and it should work without further issues.

[b-ran]

I apologizes if I sound like an idiot haha. This is the way I imagined it, my Mac as obviously the osx and the external as windows, execpt the Mac does the computing for both via virtualbox. Does that make any sense or is it complete bs?

[mpack]

It's hard to comment on whether you should find your own mental models useful. If it works for you then it isn't bs.

In this case however you should remember that virtual machines usually use virtual drives, not physical drives. The virtual drive is just a file on the physical drive, and the physical drive belongs to the host - and should be formatted for the hosts use and obviously must be capable of storing that big file!

[b-ran]

Ah I think I have a better understanding now. I was thinking that the external hard drive would act as a actual hard when using it. I didn't know that virtualbox only creates a file, that makes sense tho. Thanks for clearing it up.