Resizing a VDI in VirtualBox 3 with one command

Mar 10, 2011

Here’s a quick way to expand a (VDI) Virtual Disk Image in VirtualBox 3.

Create a new VDI with the new size of your choice. (File / Virtual Media Manager / New…)

Run this command:

$ VBoxManage clonehd --existing old.vdi new.vdi

This may take a few minutes.

Simply replace the attached old.vdi with the new.vdi in your virtual machine’s storage settings.
You will need to extend your partition from your guest OS. This can be done under Windows 7 from the control panel (Create and format hard disk partitions) and with GParted in Ubuntu and compatible Linux distributions.

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Hey there, I'm Olivier Lalonde, aka Oli, an entrepreneur / software engineer from planet Earth.

Misc. facts about me: I co-founded Binded (acquired by Pixsy), authored a function in Node.js' standard library, wrote an npm package that gets ~30M weekly downloads, was an early adopter of Bitcoin and wrote one of its first alternative implementations.

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