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Yesterday I launched one of my virtual machines to find out that I am low on space. I wanted to expand the static (fixed size) disk but apparently this couldn’t be done on a static disk. Some posts indicated that one could clone the disk as a dynamic one and then resize that.

I wanted to resizing the vdi disk from 7GB to 12GB. To do this I

1. converted the static disk into a dynamic disk using
   vboxmanage clonehd disk-name.vdi new-disk-name.vdi
2. resized the disk using
   VBoxManage modifyhd new-disk-name.vdi --resize 12000  #12000 is 12000MB
3. replaced the disks in the settings of the machine (ie; removed the old disk and added the new disk)

But this did not solve the problem. Albeit the disk is now dynamic and 12GB in size, still the additional space was detected as unallocated space in the virtual Ubuntu 12.04. Given that the unallocated space was added to the end of the partition table, there was no way of resizing the root partition. Continue reading