

During this process, you will create a new hard drive for the machine. The first step is to create a completely new virtual machine. To create a new virtual drive, you need to do some of the following. Implementation on other platforms may be slightly different, but the basic idea is unchanged.įirst you need to turn off the virtual machine to access the setup. The following article will show you how to add a drive for a virtual machine running Windows XP on VirtualBox, done on a Linux computer (Ubuntu 10.10). However, the final result will satisfy you. This can be done in VirtualBox, even though it's a bit round-the-clock. Normally, virtual machines are set up for fixed storage, and once you reach that limit, you may feel confused, unless you know how to add virtual drives to the machine. However, those who are able to go deeper into the virtualization world recognize that sometimes managing virtual machines can be a little confusing. Windows XP does not allow you to extend your hard drive but you can download a partition manager to do so – if you’ve got enough space.Network Administration - With advantages such as: efficient, reliable and easy to recover, virtualization technology brings many benefits to us.


Note also that this last step only works in Windows 7 or above. VirtualBox will only consume the physical space as and when you use it. Note that you won’t suddenly find that 40GB has suddenly been occupied on your Mac hard drive as a result of this process. Your hard drive will then be extended to fill the extra disk space that you allocated to it. You can then extend the Dynamic Disk using the Extend Volume… option by right-clicking on your hard drive. Go to your Start Menu, My Computer, right click and select Manage:Ĥ. You then need to go into Windows and instruct it that you’ve allocated more hard drive space for it on your Mac. The resizing will be almost instant as the 100% progress indicator should show.ģ. For example, this is how it looked on my Mac: Substituting USERNAME with your Mac username. VBoxManage modifyhd “/Users/USERNAME/VirtualBox VMs/Test/Test.vdi” –resize 40000 Decide how much extra hard drive space you want to allocate and convert it to MB (in my case 40GB = 40000 MB). You now need to instruct your Mac that you want to allocate more disk space to Virtual Box.

If you used a fixed disk space, you can’t resize it and the only option is to remove applications or reinstall Windows with a larger disk space allocation.Ģ. Make sure that you installed Windows in VirtualBox using Dynamically Allocated disk space which you can check under Settings, Storage and checking the label under Details.
