How To Increase VirtualBox Hard Disk Image Size

After creating Virtual Machine using VirtualBox and installed Operating system on it, you feel that the Hard Disk Storage Space allotted is too small? Do not despair, there isno need to start all over again, you can expand the capacity of a VDI virtual drive without creating a new virtual machine without having to spend time to reinstall an operating system.

CloneVDI, a nice freeware program that allows you to increase the size of virtual hard disk without altering the content. Here’s a step by step guide to increase size of VDI.

1. Go to VirtualBox forums,  Download CloneVDI 2.05.exe
2. Open the zip file you just downloaded, extract the contents into any folder and start the application CloneVDI.exe;
3. Click the Browse button and select the Source field on the hard drive to expand VirtualBox (VDI is the file format with the same name of the virtual machine to which you refer);
4. Tick ??the Increase virtual drive size to in the text field and type the new size as to take the drive (in GB);
5. Tick ??the Increase partition size (so that the more added to the GB drives are not recognized as unallocated space, but as a real expansion of the system partition);
6. Click the Proceed button and wait for few minutes to complete expansion process. When the operation is completed, the new drive will be expanded in the same folder as the original with the prefix of the name (eg Clone of XPose.vdi Clone if the drive is called XPose.vdi expanded);
7. Upon completion of the procedure to expand the hard disk for VirtualBox, you must instruct the virtual machine to load the new drive in place of the old. To do this you need to run VirtualBox, right click on the virtual machine extended relative to the drive and select Settings from the context menu;
8. In the window that is open, go to the Storage section, click on the original drive of the virtual machine (eg XPose.vdi) and delete it by clicking on the button with the symbol – red in the bottom;
9. Click on the item and add the new IDE drive on a virtual machine (eg Clone of XPose.vdi) by clicking first on the second button with the green + symbol and then choose an existing disk;
10. Click on the drive you just added and select the primary slave IDE hard drive from the drop-down list;
11. Click OK to save the changes and start the virtual machine.