Posted on

Increasing Disk Size for a VirtualBox VM

There are 2 possible ways I know of to increase the size of a virtual drive when using VirtualBox:

  1. VBoxManage
    1. Using Windows Explorer go to C:Users<your name>VirtualBox VMs<VM Name>
    2. Make a backup of your existing VirtualBox disk file ( <disk name>.vdi )
    3. Open a command prompt as administrator
    4. cd to C:Program FilesOracleVirtualBox
    5. vboxmanage modifyhd “C:Users<your name>VirtualBox VMs<VM Name><disk name>.vdi” –resize 20000
    6. This will resize it to 20gb
  2. CloneVDI Tool
    1. Download CloneVDI from this post.
    2. Unzip it
    3. Run CloneVDI.exe as administrator
    4. Enter the source and destination
    5. Check:
      1. Increase virtual drive size to
        1. Enter the new size you would like
      2. Increase partition size
    6. Click Proceed button
    7. After the clone completes
    8. Close CloneVDI Tool
    9. Rename your old .vdi file to <orig filename>.vdi_old
    10. Rename the cloned .vdi from Clone of <filename>.vdi to <filename>.vdi
Posted on

VirtualBox – Windows is shutting down…. forever!

I’ve run into a bug with VirtualBox and at least Windows XP where trying to reboot or shutdown the VM causes the shutdown process to hang at the screen displaying: Windows is shutting down. This problem has to do with mouse pointer integration.

To fix the problem:

  1. Start the VM
  2. Machine > Disable Mouse Integration
  3. Machine > Close > Save the machine state
  4. Start the VM

At this point shutting down or restarting the VM should not hang. Thanks to this post for pointing me in the right direction.