Expand Virtual Disk on Oracle VirtualBox

Disk too small?  It happens.  There is an easy fix, well mostly for Windows.

Assumptions

• You have the latest Oracle VirtualBox
• You have enough space on your drive to support a larger virtual disk.  This includes the temporary disk space that is equivalent to the original disk size during the clone process.

Part I - Create Virtual Hard Drive

1. Open the VirtualBox Manager.
2. Select the non-running virtual machine and select Settings.
3. Select Storage.
4. Click on the SATA controller and add another hard drive.
• Select (.VDI) and select Next.
• Give it a name and select Next.
• Choose the size you want (or expanding).
• Select Create.  
• This will create the VDI.  
• This could take up to 20-30 minutes for a physical fixed size.

Part II - Clone the Old Drive

1. Open a command prompt and go to where VirtualBox is installed.  For windows this is under C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\
2. At the command prompt, type the following and hit enter:
   vboxmanage clonehd "<path>OldHDFile.vdi" "<path>NewHDFile.vdi" --existing
3. This can take 20-30 minutes to accomplish.  Depends on the size of your virtual drive, disk speed, etc.  

Part III - Remove the Old Drive

1. Go back into VirtualBox Manager.
2. Select the drive you don't want to keep and right-click and select Remove Attachment.

Part IV - Utilize the Partition

1. Go into the Disk Manager for your OS.
1. MAC:  See these instructions - as you will have some problems with the partitions and this goes through how to handle with GParted.  Scroll-down about half-way.  I was unable to get the instructions to work for the particular VM for the Mac OS X - so I rebuilt the VM instead since I was using a fixed drive.
2. Windows OS:  Go into Disk Management.
3. 
   

You are now ready to use the cloned, larger, virtual drive.

Happy computing!