Additional newsize parameter for VBoxManage clonehd

[Terry Ellison]

Another issue which comes up repeatedly on the forum: how to extend the size of a VDI, once created.

The new 2.1 clonehd algo now in essence does a create of the new hd and then a dd of the content of the old image to new. Adding an optional size parameter to the clonehd command, to allow the user to override the size of the output disk image would go a long way to simplifying this for basic users. This would involve perhaps a dozen extra lines to VBoxManage.cpp and a few to VBoxManageDisk.cpp.

With this change, the instructions to the users become a lot more straight forward:

Clone your virtual image to a larger VDI using the VBoxManage clonehd command specifying the new size, then use a third party partition resizing tool such as GParted (typically booting from a LiveCD) to resize your partitions. Note that you will need to have enough space on your underlying file system to contain both the old and new disk images.

[vbox4me2]

I would rather see a GUI option to set a new larger size without any change to the VDI other then extend the limit. There is no need to clone anything, gparted will do the rest.

Ie. A=20gb, B=40gb, dd A to B, the contents of B has not changed, only the base size that even VBox is unaware of until gparted resizes it.

[Frank Mehnert]

Support for resizing disks was added in VBox 4.0. I hope this makes resizing a hard disk on the fly superfluous.