Technology Tales

Adventures in consumer and enterprise technology

Creating a VirtualBox virtual disk image using the Linux command line

Published on 9th September 2019 Estimated Reading Time: 1 minute

Much of the past weekend was spent getting a working Debian 10 installation up and running in a VirtualBox virtual machine. Because I chose the Cinnamon desktop environment, the process was not as smooth as I would have liked, so a minimal installation was performed before I started to embellish as I liked. Along the way, I got to wondering if I could create virtual hard drives using the command line, and I found that something like the following did what was needed:

VBoxManage createmedium disk --filename <full path including file name without extension> -size <size in MiB> --format VDI --variant Standard

Most of the options are self-explanatory, apart from the one named variant. This defines whether the VDI file expands to the maximum size specified using the size parameter or is reserved with the size defined in that parameter. Two VDI files were created in this way and I used these to replace their Debian 8 predecessors and even to save a bit of space too. If you want, you can find out more in the user documentation, but this post hopefully gets you started anyway.

Keywords

Just click on one of these terms to find more like this:

  • The content, images, and materials on this website are protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, or published in any form without the prior written permission of the copyright holder. All trademarks, logos, and brand names mentioned on this website are the property of their respective owners. Unauthorised use or duplication of these materials may violate copyright, trademark and other applicable laws, and could result in criminal or civil penalties.

  • All comments on this website are moderated and should contribute meaningfully to the discussion. We welcome diverse viewpoints expressed respectfully, but reserve the right to remove any comments containing hate speech, profanity, personal attacks, spam, promotional content or other inappropriate material without notice. Please note that comment moderation may take up to 24 hours, and that repeatedly violating these guidelines may result in being banned from future participation.

  • By submitting a comment, you grant us the right to publish and edit it as needed, whilst retaining your ownership of the content. Your email address will never be published or shared, though it is required for moderation purposes.

Copyright © 2007-2025, TechnologyTales.com