Increasing VirtualBox hard drive size

While trying to import a huge (1.7Go) mysql dump file into my VM I was blocked by mysql telling me that not enough space was left on the device to complete the operation.

As I was running a VM, I thought it would be a simple matter of increasing the virtual hard drive size.

Turns out it wasn't that simple. After much trial and error, here is how I finally did it.

Creating a new hard drive

VirtualBox let you easily add new devices, such as hard drives to your VM. I simply created an empty 120Go hard drive and booted my VM.

Here, under Ubuntu, I cloned my current hard drive to the new one using:

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb

Fixing the guest partition

Once finished, I opened Gparted, selected /dev/sdb and saw that I had 112Go unallocated. I couldn't easily add them to the initial partition as a swap partition was in the way.

I finally decided to remove the swap partition and resize the initial one to the (almost) complete size of the hard drive.

I left 1Go free in case I ever needed to create a new swap partition later to fix the one I deleted.

Then, I closed the VM. Get back to VirtualBox panel and remove the original drive, keeping only the new 120Go one.

One reboot later, my Ubuntu was proudly displaying its 120Go.