Resize a fixed harddisk (.vhd) in VirtualBox

Introduction

I'm using VirtualBox for a while now and it's an easy to use product. But, there are some things that can be done easier with VMWare. For instance resizing a disk. There seems to be a problem with the disk I've created (during the blogpost serie of "Creating a SQL Server 2012 Playground").  I've selected the fixed instead of dynamic one. And now I've found out that my diskspace is to small to install more software. In this blogpost I'll describe a solution for enlarging a VirtualBox static disk.

The problem

An error appears when you try enlarge the disk with the commandline command "VBoxManage" :

       
VBoxManage modifyhd "D:\VirtualBox VMs\NewSQL
Server2012Playground\NewSQLServer2012Playground.vhd" --resize 30000

results in

0%...
Progress state: VBOX_E_NOT_SUPPORTED
VBoxManage.exe: error: Resize hard disk operation
for this format is not implemented yet!
       
 

Solution

Great! Well there seems to be a solution. Someone has built a small tool to turn the static disk into a dynamic disk and it enlarges the disk too. The tool is named Clonevdi.

It will recreate another disk (clone). Therefore you need to change the disk from the old disk to the cloned disk. On the host system, start VirtualBox, and select the virtual machine whose hard disk you are expanding, and navigate to Settings, Storage. Change the SATA Controller so that it uses the new virtual disk file instead of the old one.

When this is ready it's possible to expand the disk with computermanagement (extend volumne)

Conclusion

In this blogpost i've described a solution for enlarging the static disks in Virtual Box. I thought I was in trouble but thankfully a tool helped me out.

Greetz,
Hennie