Increase disk size of VirtualBox

http://forums.virtualbox.org/download/file.php?id=1818

CloneVDI tool - Discussion & Support

by mpack » 15. Sep 2009, 23:13

Many Windows users dislike the fact that you currently have to use the Command Prompt to clone VDI files. Also, questions often arise related to VDI files such as "how do I increase the maximum size of a VDI?" or "how can I make my dynamic VDI file small again?". As a recent vacation project I decided to try to write a nice simple tool that provided a good answer to all of these questions. Hopefully I succeeded.

Attached to this message is a zip file containing the software tool that I wrote, which I call "CloneVDI" (currently at version 2.02). Features as of this release include:

• Reads VDI,VHD,VMDK,Parallels HDD,RAW files and physical drives, writes VDI.
• A simple GUI Interface.
• A CLI interface too (for people who like that kind of thing!)
• Ability to compact (discard unused blocks from) the clone, with no need to run sdelete/zerofree first.
• Ability to enlarge the maximum size of a virtual disk, optionally enlarging the main partition too.
• User choice to either keep the old UUID or generate a new one for the clone.
• Some useful diagnostics about the source VDI, such as the partition map and the internal fileystem.
• Better feedback while cloning: a progress bar and an estimated time to completion.
• It seems to be significantly faster than "VBoxManage clonehd".
• Open source.

To install, simply create a folder and unpack the zip contents into it. Optionally, you can create a shortcut to link your desktop to the CloneVDI.exe file in the target folder. The zip file includes release notes which hopefully provides answers to all of your questions.

Note that this tool is not simply a GUI front end for VBoxManage. Instead it uses my own code to read and write VDI files (and other formats), and therefore works in a rather different way, with different features and capabilities.

Enjoy. Feel free to ask any questions here, but read the release notes first.

[ Edit: 1st Mar. CloneVDI attachment updated to v2.02. Fixed another bug in "enlarge partition" feature, completed French language support. ]
[ Edit: 8th Feb. CloneVDI attachment updated to v2.01. Fixed bug in "enlarge partition" feature, added French language support. ]
[ Edit: 31st Jan. CloneVDI attachment updated to v2.00. This version includes several new features and some tidy-ups ]
[ Edit: 10th Dec. CloneVDI attachment updated to v1.43. This version fixes a problem when enlarging drives smaller than 8GB ]
[ Edit: 12th Nov. CloneVDI attachment updated to v1.42. This version adds support for Dutch and German languages ]
[ Edit: 31st Oct. CloneVDI attachment updated to v1.41. This version has several internal tidy-ups, and adds the CLI feature. ]
[ Edit: 14th Oct. CloneVDI attachment updated to v1.40. This version adds RAW read support and a "sector viewer" feature. ]
[ Edit: 07th Oct. CloneVDI attachment updated to v1.30. This version adds VMDK read support. ]
[ Edit: 21st Sep. CloneVDI attachment updated to v1.22. The previous version STILL couldn't handle VHDs bigger than 4GB. ]
[ Edit: 21st Sep. CloneVDI attachment updated to v1.21. The previous version didn't like VHDs bigger than 4GB. ]
[ Edit: 20th Sep. CloneVDI attachment updated to v1.20. This version adds VHD read support. ]
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v2.02 source code can be found here: CloneVDI-src-v2.02.zip
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ATTACHMENTS

CloneVDI-exe-2.02.zip

CloneVDI v2.02, executable with release notes.

(119.2 KiB) Downloaded 376 times

Last edited by mpack on 1. Mar 2010, 12:49, edited 27 times in total.