virtualbox.org

Host: Mavericks, VM VirtualBox: 4.3.4
Guest: Win7 SP1 + 4.3.4 Guest Additions

I am running out of hard disk space (at 25GB) on the guest. (I have hundreds of GB free on the host, so that's not an issue.)

It looks as though Virtual Media Manager's "Copy" command can take the VMDK file and either copy it as another VMDK, or as a VDI, but in neither case do I see any possibility of increasing the disk size. I'm also not sure about all the UUID warnings, because my intent is to replace the existing VM with a new one with a larger virtual HDD. I will be discarding the original VM as soon as the new one is known to work.

Is there a way to move to a larger (virtual) hard disk without having to create a brand-new VM and reinstall everything from scratch? I notice that VBoxManage modifyhd can resize a VDI, but only if the VDI is "dynamically allocated" (how would I ensure that on a copy from VMDK?).

Perhaps related question: Is there an explanation somewhere of the --variant parameters: "Standard, Fixed, Split2G, Stream, ESX"? Everywhere I can find them in the manual, they are simply listed, but with no explanation of the semantics of each choice.

TIA,

Mark

P.S. The 4.3.4 documentation (Chapter 5.3) does not discuss the "Copy" and "Modify" options of the Virtual Media Manager.

VMDK cannot be resized, only VDI & VHD, in dynamic size variant, for increasing size only.
The info is a but cumbersom to find in the User manual : Topic 1.7 redirects you to Topic 5.2 which redirects you to Topic 8.23 where the info is clearly stated.

The "variant" parameters are the possible variants on the supported disk formats. Most formats have fixed vs dynamic (a.k.a. standard) variants, the remaining options are mostly from VMDK (e.g. split2G refers to the VMDK option of splitting the image into 2GB extents). You would need to refer to the spec for each format to understand precisely what variants exist in that format.

As for increasing the capacity of a disk, see Howto: Resize a Virtual Drive. In particular note the second message of the tutorial.

The "Howto" worked for me.

I was able to use the GUI (Virtual Media Manager) to clone (second message of tutorial), but had to use the command line to modify (first step of first message of tutorial), as Virtual Media Manager's modify option makes you change the variant before letting you resize. Win7's Disk Management had an easy time expanding the partition into the newly larger HDD.

Thank you.