Expanding a (used) Virtualbox disk

[viking60]

We all know the problem your disk gets full and on some distros (like Suse) that does fubar your upgrade. It is not a good thing so we start expanding partitions with Gparted (on the Viking multi rescue disk) to make room or you start to delete stuff to make room etc.

In Virtualbox you get the same problem but here you can simply increase the size of you Virtual disk to make space - so after having fubared a Suse upgrade that took way to much space on my 8 G Virtual disk; I decided to make it bigger.

It is the same thing as buying a bigger hard disk so I bought myself a 15 G hard disk like this:

First I found the name of the disk under storage in the Virtualbox control panel.
Then I found that disk - which is actually a file - in ~/.VirtualBox/HardDisks/
In my case the hard disk was called Centos64_bit.vdi

Yes I know I have Suse on it but that is what I called it when I created it - it does not matter.

So time to enter the magic command then:

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VBoxManage modifyhd /home/viking/.VirtualBox/HardDisks/Centos64_bit.vdi --resize 15480

And that was it ! The hard disk was resized to 15G!

I logged in to Suse in VB and it was all there but I had not gotten more space though.

Even if it is a Virtual Machine we have to resize the partition so I booted the VM with the Viking Ultimate rescue DVD and fired up Systemrescuecd and there i Started Gparted.
And true enough there was a 6 G unused partition there so I simply stretched it with Gparted and hit that green execute check thing.

And it failed.. due to unsuccessful file system check.

Now Suse is btrfs but repeated attempts simply did not go through so I decided to do it the Cli way:

First I made a directory

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mkdir /mnt/suse

Then I checked in Gparted where the Suse install was - and it was in /dev/sda2 so I mounted it like this:

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mount -t btrfs /dev/sda2 /mnt/suse

Then I went to /mnt/suse and the Suse files were there.

Here I did the good old

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fsck -t btrfs

And it went so fast I thought I had done something wrong so I did it several times.

Then I went back to Gparted ans stretched the partition again ... and this time it went through with flying colors.

Time to reboot then..
And the Suse install was still there with lots of additional disk space

The Viking Ultimate rescue Multi DVD saved the day