Resize a VistualBox disk

To resize a virtualbox disk, you can do it from the GUI on current systems;

FILE > VIRTUAL MEDIA MANAGER

Afterwords, you still need to make this new size available to the guest ans to do this, you need to create or modify the existing partitions inside the guest OS.

For this note, we will consider a command line interface of an old Debian system, where we needed to use parted. The guide here was useful. Of course different OS's and situations will have different requirements, such as the use of fdisk, cfdisk, gparted etc

Essentially for parted, use print and print free to examine the existing partitions.

mkpart will prompt with some questions to allow you to create an additional partition. Use the Start and End values being the Start of the new partition which is the End of the previous Partition and the End value being either the End of the disk or some other end point.

After this we need to format the new partition and for this we can use;

mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda7

where /dev/sda7 is the new partition.

We then need to add it to the fstab file