VirtualBox crashes after increasing the storage size

[whimsical1987]

I cannot start my Ubuntu after expanding the harddisk. Installed the Ubuntu 12.04 with 30GB space and I ran out of space, so I used gparted live to expand the disk space. After doing that my partition table got corrupted I guess and I am not able to boot to my environment. VirtualBox keeps crashing, after several attempts, finally Ubuntu boots in read-only mode. I am not sure how to fix this. Please help me.

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sudo LANG=C sfdisk -d /dev/sda > sfdisk.txt
# partition table of /dev/sda
unit: sectors


/dev/sda1 : start=     2048, size= 67102720, Id=83, bootable
/dev/sda2 : start= 67104768, size= 16781312, Id= 5
/dev/sda3 : start=        0, size=        0, Id= 0
/dev/sda4 : start=        0, size=        0, Id= 0

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Warning: extended partition does not start at a cylinder boundary.
DOS and Linux will interpret the contents differently.


sfdisk: ERROR: sector 67104768 does not have an msdos signature

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sudo LANG=C fdisk -lu
sudo: unable to open /var/lib/sudo/portaldev/2: Read-only file system
Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 5 will be corrected by w(rite)


Disk /dev/sda: 42.9 GB, 42949672960 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 5221 cylinders, total 83886080 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00020bb7


   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *        2048    67104767    33551360   83  Linux
/dev/sda2        67104768    83886079     8390656    5  Extended

[loukingjr]

I don't know if anyone can help you fix the problem but you can't use GParted to resize a virtual drive.

[mpack]

As Lou says, gparted is a guest tool, it can't be used to affect host files, which is what is required to increase capacity. It looks as if you've somehow managed to corrupt the disk - if indeed the crash is related.

In any case, a VM log file might be helpful. See Minimum information needed for assistance.

[whimsical1987]

I followed the instructions from this post viewtopic.php?f=6&t=46814

I attached VBox.log in my original post, let me know if you need anything more. Thanks !

[loukingjr]

I followed the instructions from this post viewtopic.php?f=6&t=46814

I attached VBox.log in my original post, let me know if you need anything more. Thanks !

The post you followed says to resize the .vdi first, then use GParted to expand the partition.

[whimsical1987]

Sorry, for not being clear. I resized the .vdi disk file to 40Gb and then used gparted to resize the unallocated space.

[loukingjr]

Sorry, for not being clear. I resized the .vdi disk file to 40Gb and then used gparted to resize the unallocated space.

ahhh, that's different. in GParted all you should have had to do is drag the partition to fill up the unused space. I've only done it a few times but it always worked for me. did you try and move any partitions or type in a new size?

[mpack]

I attached VBox.log in my original post

Oh, so you did. I couldn't see the wood for the trees.

You should have looked in the "Howto" area of this site, specifically Howto: Resize a Virtual Drive. Then you might have known that you absolutely must not attempt to resize a drive if you've used snapshots, which it appears (according to the log) that you have. Actually, the thread you referenced also mentions this.

[whimsical1987]

ahhh, that's different. in GParted all you should have had to do is drag the partition to fill up the unused space. I've only done it a few times but it always worked for me. did you try and move any partitions or type in a new size?

I tried to move the partition from right to left before swap space. The extra 10gb space I created was on the right side after swap-space, so deleted the swap and moved to left to have single disk and created swap on the right. Did I mess up something in that process ?

[loukingjr]

well, mpack is certainly correct about not resizing a disk with snapshots. once you did that, nothing you did in GParted would matter.

[whimsical1987]

As far as I remember, I resized the latest snapshot.
So, I have to reinstall everything from the scratch. That sounds scary, I have lot of configurations to the application server, I have to spend redoing all that..

[mpack]

It's hard to predict what the effect would be of resizing just a part of a snapshot chain. It depends on which chain element you picked on (the base VDI or one of the snapshots?), and it also depends very much on how much the snapshot was relying on underlying filesystem data structures remaining fixed. The fact that GParted saw a larger disk (if I understand your description correctly) implies that the change was visible to the current state, meaning it had propagated through the snapshot chain... which is probably bad news, as it implies that the entire chain is affected. This is assuming that you resized the base VDI.

The following lines from the log file look sinister as well.

00:00:11.178993 AHCI#0P0: Read at offset 34359099392 (4096 bytes left) returned rc=VERR_INVALID_PARAMETER
00:00:11.179238 AHCI#0: Port 0 reset
00:00:11.497135 AHCI#0P0: Read at offset 34359119872 (4096 bytes left) returned rc=VERR_INVALID_PARAMETER
00:00:11.497301 AHCI#0P0: Canceled read at offset 1228800 (4096 bytes left) returned rc=VINF_SUCCESS

In theory, something like this (a snapshot chain containing of elements of a wrong size) should not make VirtualBox crash, but the reality is sometimes different.