Increase Virtual Box VDI disk size on MAC or Windows

Need more space on your Virtual Box disc? I installed Windows 7 on Oracle Virtual Box but didn’t estimate the size of disk correctly. The drive is now nearing it’s capacity, how do you extend the size? It will take the following steps to achieve an extended disk capacity:

1. Create a new virtual disk
2. Clone the old disk to this newly created virtual disk
3. Disconnect the old disk via storage settings in Virtual Box
4. Connect/Attach the new disk to the Virtual Machine
5. Boot up using the new disk
6. Go to Windows Computer Management and Extend the disk space

Let’s go each step in a bit of detail now.

1. Create new virtual disk via Settings –> Storage. Make sure you choose enough size as per your requirements when creating this new disk. Choose Dynamically expanding storage for the disk storage type.

2. Clone the old disk to this new disk – the idea is that the bigger new disk receives a disc copy of the old one. Use the following command for this (assuming Oracle VirtualBox is installed at C:\VirtualBox on your machine, otherwise navigate to the appropriate directory first):

1	C:\VirtualBox>

2	C:\VirtualBox>VBoxManage clonehd [OldHDDFile.vdi] [NewHDDFile.vdi] --existing

3	C:\VirtualBox>

Note: Use full path with [OldHDDFile.vdi] and [NewHDDFile.vdi]. It can take few minutes for the Clone process to complete.

3. Disconnect the old disk via storage settings in Virtual Box

4. Connect/Attach the new disk to the Virtual Machine

5. Boot/Start the Virtual Machine

6. Go to Windows Computer Management –> Disk/Storage management and Extend the disk space on C drive to use the newly created/unallocated disk space

That’s all enjoy the extended sized disk!!