TOPIC: VDI
Converting QEMU disk images to VirtualBox images on Linux Mint 21
30th October 2022Recently, VirtualBox gained fuller support for Windows 11 and I successively set up a new Windows 11 virtual machine that, I hope, will supplant a Windows 10 counterpart in time. While the setup itself was streamlined, I ran into such stability issues that I set the new VM aside until a new version of VirtualBox got released. That has happened with the appearance of version 7.0.2, but Windows 11 remains prone to freezing on my Linux Mint machine. Thankfully, that now is much less frequent, yet the need for added stability remains outstanding.
While I was thinking about trying out VirtualBox 7.0.0, I remembered a QEMU machine that I had running Windows 11. Though QEMU proved more limited than VirtualBox when it came to having easy availability of functionality like moving data in and out of the virtual machine or support for sound, there was no problem with TPM support or system stability. Since it did contain some useful data, I wondered about converting its virtual hard disk to VirtualBox format, and it is easy to do. First, you need to install qemu-img and other utilities as follows:
sudo apt-get install qemu-utils
With that in place, executing a command like the following performs the required conversion. Here, the -O switch specifies the required file type of vdi in this case.
qemu-img convert -O vdi [virtual hard disk].qcow2 [virtual hard disk].vdi
While I have yet to mount it on the new VirtualBox Windows 11 virtual machine, it is good to have the old virtual hard disk available for doing so. The thought of using it as a boot drive in VirtualBox did enter my mind, but the required change of drivers and other incompatibilities dissuaded me from doing so.
Creating a VirtualBox virtual disk image using the Linux command line
9th September 2019Much 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.
Enlarging a VirtualBox VDI virtual disk
20th December 2018It is remarkable how the Windows folder manages to grow on your C drive, and one in a Windows 7 installation was the cause of my needing to expand the VirtualBox virtual machine VDI disk on which it was installed. After trying various ways to cut down the size, an enlargement could not be avoided. In all of this, it was handy that I had a recent backup for restoration after any damage.
The same thing meant that I could resort to enlarging the VDI file with more peace of mind than otherwise might have been the case. This needed use of the command line once the VM was shut down. The form of the command that I used was the following:
VBoxManage modifyhd <filepath/filename>.vdi --resize 102400
It appears that this also would work on a Windows host, but mine was Linux, and it did what I needed. The next step was to attach it to an Ubuntu VM and use GParted to expand the main partition to fill the newly available space. That does not mean that it takes up 100 GiB on my system just yet because these things can be left to grow over time and there is a way to shrink them too if you ever need to do just that. As ever, having a backup made before any such operation may have its uses if anything goes awry.