Guest Linux says "low disk space"

[cyboman]

I have Ubuntu 14.04 installed as a guest OS on my Win 7 machine. VirtualBox shows that Virtual Disk Size for this OS is 8 GB, Actual Disk Size is 3.65 GB and the disk is set to be expanded dynamically. My Ubuntu Disk Size has already reached a limit of 3.65 GB and is telling me that it is low on disk space. At this point I would expect the drive to expand, but it is not happening. Does anybody know what is the problem?

Thanks

[mpack]

First, disk capacity never expands. From the point of view of the guest OS the disk capacity never changes from the size you selected when the disk was created. Only the allocation (on the host) of that capacity is dynamic, i.e. done on demand.

If you are getting low disk space errors from a guest OS then it means you are approaching the capacity of a partition, probably the main partition. I'm guessing that your partition is around 4GB. You can use a partition manager such as GParted to expand this, if there is unallocated space on the drive.

See the user manual for an explanation of what "dynamic" and "fixed" means in the context of virtual disk images.

[Perryg]

Is the guest disk formatted in LVM? Post the results of the following from the guest terminal

Code: Select all

df -h