Virtualbox / Kubuntu Question

[craigbert]

Hello All,

Back again with a blatant display of ignorance.

I installed Kubuntu (12.10) on a VirtualBox disk that was 4GB. It was set for dynamic allocation, but that did not seem to be working right. It never "grew".
So I created another larger vb disk (32GB ~ just to be safe) and did a quick vanilla install on that.
Then I booted up using the CD image and did a "dd" from the old to the new.
Everything looks OK in the partitioning (kpartition), but it is complaining that I am out of room when I really am not.

Any ideas where I have gone awry?

[oshunluvr]

Yes, dd re-creates the drive image so you've imaged a 4GB drive onto a 32GB space. In a hardware environment, you might be able to resize the 4GB drive into the 32GB space but I don't know if you can do that in a VM. If you booted to another VM, attached the 32GB drive to it as a second drive, and then ran a tool like partition manager it might work.

Likely it's be less effort to re-install instead. Hind-sight and all I know; but I usually use an 8GB virtual drive for my linux VM's. 32GB is overkill IMO.

Another possibility if you're opposed to a re-install is to attach a second 4GB virtual drive to your current VM and mount it as part of your filesystem.

[oshunluvr]

BTW, dynamic allocation is intended to save drive space by allowing the VDI to grow to it's maximum size. You limited yourself to 4GB.

It's better to over-allocate when using dynamic allocation.

[james147]

First, the 4GB you set was the maximum size for that image, the actual disk would have allocated more space as it needed up upto that amount.

Second, dd copies the entire disk, including the partition table, but if you have not edited it then the partition will remain the same size but you will now have a large amount of unallocated space at the end of the disk. To fix this boot a live cd and use gparted to change the partition size. Gparted should also grow the filesystem to fill the new partition size.

However, if you are dding a vm drive file to another vm drive file you might not have any extra space to expand into... You might beable to increase the size of the virtual image from within virtualbox and then use gparted to increase the size of the partition.

[craigbert]

BTW, here is the output from df -h & fdisk -l:

df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 6.2G 5.9G 35M 100% /
udev 998M 12K 998M 1% /dev
tmpfs 404M 760K 403M 1% /run
none 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
none 1009M 80K 1009M 1% /run/shm
none 100M 12K 100M 1% /run/user
SharedDrive 150G 109G 41G 74% /media/sf_SharedDrive

fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 35.2 GB, 35236347904 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4283 cylinders, total 68820992 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0006f945

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 2048 64626687 32312320 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 64628734 68818943 2095105 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 64628736 68818943 2095104 82 Linux swap / Solaris

[james147]

So the image is the right size, its just the partition table that is off, boot a live cd and run gparted to correct this.

[craigbert]

Ooops. Just saw ya'lls post.

oshunluvr ~ how would I mount part of my file system to a different / new drive? I know how to create and attach the new drive...mounting is a different story with the data for those mount points is a different story.

james147 ~ When I look in Partition Manager it appears like I would expect 32GB. Might there be some other way to deal with this?

[craigbert]

james147 ~ I will give that a shot!

[james147]

Ooops. Just saw ya'lls post.

oshunluvr ~ how would I mount part of my file system to a different / new drive? I know how to create and attach the new drive...mounting is a different story with the data for those mount points is a different story.

james147 ~ When I look in Partition Manager it appears like I would expect 32GB. Might there be some other way to deal with this?

The drive should appear as the right size, but if you click on it the partitions inside will still be the old size. From your disk layout you will need to move the swap and extended partition to the end of the disk and then increase the size of the first partition

[craigbert]

james147 ~ GParted reports that the size is 30.82GB, used = 30.44GB, and Unused = 383.75MB.
That makes no sense to me because I know that there is NOT 30GB of stuff there. Plus on the host system (Windows XP) it shows that *.vdi to be about 7.6GB.
How should I use GParted to fix this?

[craigbert]

At least Partition Manager shows it more correctly...30.82GB with 5.91GB used and 24.9GB free...

[craigbert]

As a side question since I may need to start from scratch...
The PITA is going through and selecting the packages I want/need. Is there a way to export the list of packages I have and then feeding them to a package manager to process?

[james147]

Screen shots might make whats going on clearer

[james147]

As a side question since I may need to start from scratch...
The PITA is going through and selecting the packages I want/need. Is there a way to export the list of packages I have and then feeding them to a package manager to process?

There is, I think moun can do this, if not dpkg can... cannot remember the commands by hand any more.

[craigbert]

Here are some screenshots...not very big, but hopefully useful.