When trying to resize the size of my VDI to 80GB with this command:

VBoxManage modifyhd "C:\Users\<USERNAME>\VirtualBox VMs\<VDU Folder>\<VDI Name>.vdi" --resize 81920

I ran into this error:

Progress state: VBOX_E_NOT_SUPPORTEDVBoxManage.exe: error: Failed to resize medium
VBoxManage.exe: error: Resizing to new size 85899345920 is not yet supported for medium 'C:\Users\Tony\VirtualBox VMs\KDE\KDE.vdi'
VBoxManage.exe: error: Details: code VBOX_E_NOT_SUPPORTED (0x80bb0009), component MediumWrap, interface IMedium
VBoxManage.exe: error: Context: "enum RTEXITCODE __cdecl handleModifyMedium(struct HandlerArg *)" at line 816 of file VBoxManageDisk.cpp

After some research, I found that if you set your VDI properties as Fixed when initially setting up your VirtualBox image, it cannot be resized directly through VirtualBox. You can however resize this via the command prompt using VBManage command in the VirtualBox folder.

Step 1: Open up a Command Prompt window and navigate to the VirtualBox folder

cd "C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\"

Step 2: Since resize only supports dynamic VDI’s, we will need to verify that your vdi file format is Fixed default with the following command:

VBoxManage showhdinfo "C:\Users\<USERNAME>\VirtualBox VMs\<VDI Folder>\<VDI Name>.vdi"
<USERNAME> = your Username
<VDI Folder> = You may have another folder before you are in the directory where your VDI is located
<VDI Name> = The name of your VDI file

Step 3: Cloning your vdi file will automatically convert this to dynamic and you can do this with the following command:

VBoxManage clonehd "C:\Users\<USERNAME>\VirtualBox VMs\<VDI Folder>\<VDI Name>.vdi" "C:\Users\<USERNAME>\VirtualBox VMs\<VDI NewFolder>\<VDI NewName>.vdi"

Step 4: After conversion, you can re-run the first command to resize the vdi file.

VBoxManage modifyhd "C:\Users\<USERNAME>\VirtualBox VMs\<VDU Folder>\<VDI Name>.vdi" --resize 81920

Step 5: Finally, after this is completed, you will need to unmount the old VDI file and mount the cloned and resized VDI file to your VM:

– Right-click on the VM and click on Settings
– Click on the Storage tab
– Click on your vdi and then click on the Disk icon next to the dropdown in the Attributes section, click Choose File and choose your cloned VDI file.

By Tony

5 thoughts on “How to Resize VirtualBox Hard Disk (vdi file) – VirtualBox resize hard disk error: VBOX_E_NOT_SUPPORTED”
  1. Thanks for the procedure – you can actually also do this from the GUI. The “Copy” button is for cloning disk images, and the settings default to creating a dynamic clone from a fixed-size original.

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