expanding VM with gparted

Question

I want to resize my Ubuntu VM, so I installed another Ubuntu installation (using VirtualBox) and ran Gparted on it. Here's a screenshot of the state of the partition:

In /dev/sda6, I have 3GB of the 14.3GB that are already used. I believe this is related to the Ubuntu VM which I am currently in. My question is how can I expand the /dev/sda1 in order to get 14.3Gb - 3Gb more space ?

See: http://askubuntu.com/questions/294889/how-to-expand-the-ext4-primary-partition-size-in-a-vmware-player-virtual-disk - you need to remove swap to grow /sda1. A much faster way would be to create a new VDI and just copy the files to there. — Takkat, Mar 17 '16 at 12:29
In order to move the space, the partitions must not be active. You will need to boot from Live media containing GParted. See Moving Space Between Partitions and relevant Virtual Box GParted - articles/tutorials. — Curtis Gedak, Mar 18 '16 at 19:28

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 17 '16 at 11:22

It seems that what you are having trouble with is a communication between Virtualbox, and your physical machine. When you load any OS/VM in Virtualbox you are asked to allocate a certain set space that it can use. What happens is that a "fake disk" is created, and that is what is used for the VM. In the current latest version of Ubuntu Virtualbox, I do not believe you can communicate physical data between partitions of Virtualbox -> Your hard-drive (or vice-versa)

expanding VM with gparted

1 Answers1