I love virtual box! In a matter of just a few days, I've had Fedora, Ubuntu, Open Suse, Mandriva, Free BSD and Mac OS X installed on every one of my machines! Yes, even Mac OS. And I'm running out of space fast on these virtual disks.
Here's how I increase the size of the virtual disk for my Fedora on virtual box, from 8G to 40G.
0, Make a copy of your old VDI, just in case.
1, Create a new VDI with a bigger size, 40G.
2, Download Fedora live CD image. Alternatively, you may get a GParted Live CD image, if your virtual disk is not in LVM (Logical Volume Manager) format.
3, Create a new virtual machine on virtual box. I called mine "resize-vm". Attach the Fedora live CD, your old and new VDIs to it.
4, Boot your new virtual machine "resize-vm".
5, Open a terminal, become root by "su", then copy the old disk to new disk by "dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb".
6, Shut down "resize-vm".
7, Edit the original "Fedora" virtual machine, remove the old VDI, attach the new VDI. Boot "Fedora".
8, Go to Fedora menu "Applications/System Tools/Disk Utility", create a physical volume from the unallocated space, I named it "extra". Note down the device name, which is "/dev/sda3" in my case.
9, Open a terminal, become root by "su", then run "pvcreate /dev/sda3". This way, we created a new physical volume.
10, Run "vgdisplay", find out the name of the volume group, "VolGroup".
11, Run "vgextend VolGroup /dev/sda3" to add the newly create physical volume.
12, Run "vgdisplay" again, you will see "Free PE / Size" has been increased, in my case, it's now "8191 / 32.00 GB".
13, Run "df -kh", locate your old logical volume name, which is "/dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_root".
14, Run "lvextend -L32G /dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_root".
15, Shut down "Fedora". Boot "resize-vm", become root by "su".
16, Run "e2fsck -f /dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_root".
17, Run "resize2fs /dev/mapper/VolGroup-lv_root".
18, Shut down "resize-vm". Boot "Fedora" with the new enlarged VDI.
19, Done!! Delete the old backup VDI if you want to save some disk space on your host machine.
Wow! Long process. But it's fun! I enjoyed it. LVM is really nice. It's a lot better than the old ways. If you want to learn more about LVM, check out this web site LVM HOWTO.
