VirtualBox and Making the vdi larger

I’ve read a thousand forum threads for how to do this so I wanted a way which I could replicate for some Windows guests and make it so easy even I could do it. Here is my step by step process. You will need two tools first. One is Clonezilla and the other is the freeware partitioning tool called EASEUS Home. I did this with XP only so your mileage may vary with Vista.

Here are the steps to taking a small guest image and blowing it up:

1. Create a new virtual disk using the media manager in Virtualbox. I create a dynamically expanding one because its quicker. Add it as a primary slave using the disk media manager. Don’t worry about formatting it or anything.
2. Now download the two tools and mount the clonezilla ISO image in virtualbox so it boots when you power up the guest. Clonezilla will run and you will take the disk to disk copy and make a copy from the first disk to the second disk. The first disk was my 10g smallish XP partition. The second disk was the nicely larger 60g slave partition I had just created.
3. It will take about 15 minutes or at least it did for me. When done, power down the clonezilla ISO image. Now using the media mangler in Virtualbox remove the measly partition and add the new one as the primary image.
4. Boot the new image and its still only 10g or whatever in size. You need to run the easeus disk partitioning tool, resize the partition all the way, and the tool will want a reboot. It will reboot to its system console, run the ntfs resize and then reboot again. When it reboots, it will check things again and pronounce success!
5. Boot into the XP installation and I had to redo the OS validation with Microsoft HQ. That’s okay for me since I own it from Technet. Now if you check the disk size in Windows XP, it says that I have a 60G disk drive. Yay!

All done folks! BTW, this worked for me 4 times without an error so I can say that its replicable and works without an issue on XP. Don’t know about the Vista beast. I’m staying away from Vista. Next MS OS I play with will be in October when 7 rears up.
That would be it.