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I am running a Xubuntu 14.04 guest in VirtualBox (on a Win 7 host).

The virtual disk ("Dynamically allocated") filled up, so I followed this answer using VBoxManage modifyhd to increase its size, which was easy.

Next time I started the Xubuntu guest however didn't show any free space on the drive, also gparted still shows the old disk size.

What do I have to do to make the guest recognise that the size has changed so it can make use of the added space?

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FriendFX
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I've had this problem a bunch of times. It's hard to say exactly why it's happening without screenshots of what your gparted looks like. In my case it was usually because resizing a virtual hard disk actually takes two steps.

You did the first step, which was to resize the virtual hard disk through VBoxManage. What I'd recommend next is opening up gparted and checking for any "unallocated space" on the hard disk. For Xubuntu to start using the extra space that was made available through VBoxManage, you have to use the "Resize" function to turn that "unallocated space" into space that's formatted for Linux to use.

Apologies if you checked that already--if so, are you using LVM by any chance?

Hope that helps!

Simon
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    Yes, I am using LVM. I had to go through the following steps in gparted: 1) Use the "Swapoff" feature on the swap partition to unlock the partition editing. 2) Grow the volume which includes the swap partition to fill all the "unallocated space". 3) Move the swap partition inside that volume to the very end and 4) shrink the volume from the left to include just the swap which is on the far right. This resulted in "unallocated space" between the main partition and the volume with swap. 5) So I could grow the main partition to fill the free space and voila, I had space available again! – FriendFX Dec 17 '15 at 00:58