I use VirtualBox on an almost daily basis.

As I now use Linux Mint as my operating system of choice, I need some way to run a few programmes that are specific to Windows, such as Windows Live Writer (which I am using to write this!).

A long time ago I set up a Virtual Machine to run Windows 7.  I installed Live Writer and Office (which I never managed to install via Wine despite claims that it can be done).  Since then, I backup my “VirtualBox VMs” folder and restore it after any upgrade.  My Windows 7 therefore remains pristine and fully working.

Lately however I have been running close to full disk capacity in my VM, with only 1Gb to spare.  My first thought was to create a new VM and install a copy of Windows 7 there.  That worked with no problems as I expected, however try as I might I cannot get Live Writer to work properly.  Of the three blogs I work on, one loads with no problems whatsoever, the second connects but refuses to recognise the theme and the third won’t even recognise the fact that it’s a WordPress installation.  All three blogs have identical setups so I am baffled as to the cause of this.

The solution to my problem I have now discovered is extremely easy.  I simply increased the size of my virtual hard drive.

Open a terminal in home/VirtualBox VMs  and CD into the folder that contains the virtual Machine (in my case it was “Win 7”).  Then run the command

VBoxManage modifyhd “Win 7.vdi” –resize 30000

That’s it!

Naturally you need to change the “Win 7.vdi” bit to your own VM name (and the quotes are necessary if there is a space in the name), and set your own new disk size (the number is Mb, so 30000 = 30Gb).  Note also that there are two dashes in “–resize”.

There is one further step though.  Running your VM will still show the old disk size, which may cause a moment of frustration or even panic!  The reason is that you have increased the hard disk but with an unformatted area.

In my case I simply went into Windows’ Disk Management (enter “partition” into Search to find it) and expanded my current disk to fill the new free space.

My Windows 7 Virtual Machine now has an extra 10Gb of free space!