# Resizing the Virtual Rails image file -? (NewB..) **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [July 15, 2010, 11:05pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/resizing-the-virtual-rails-image-file-newb/191661 "2010-07-15T23:05:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![tinoD](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/4da419/32.png) [@tinoD](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/tinoD)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2010, 11:05pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/resizing-the-virtual-rails-image-file-newb/191661/1 "2010-07-15T23:05:40Z")
Hi all, Have another Virtual Rails question… as a reminder - I’m a Newbie - both in RoR and even fresher in Linux… [Have a VirtualRails guest on VirtualBox running on a Windows Vista (64bit) host] Anyway - My current problem goes as follows: I’ve been using Virtual Rails for the last week or so… pretty quick and with no special effort I got 13GB out of the available fixed 15GB used (I realise a more experienced Linux user could maybe have done what I did with less… but I still want to know, as I feel 15 GB are pretty limiting and don’t wish to constantly keep worrying about the capacity of my guest machine…) So - have found some really great tutorials out there and followed a procedure using GParted Live CD in order to copy the existing partition into a bigger one. (looked into these tutorials among many others: > **[GadgetAja Blog](https://gadgetaja.com/blog)** > > Dapatkan Berita dan Informasi Terbaru Dari Kami [http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=364&start=30](http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=364&start=30) ) Anyway, my existing (smaller) partition had a primary partition (flagged with ‘boot’), with ext4 file system and in addition the HD had an extended small partition of about 690MB and inside had /dev/ sda5 marked with ‘linux swap’… I’m mentioning these setting by heart now so hope I’m not using the terms wrongly (if I do - please forgive me, I really am a newbie 🙂 )… Anyway - tried to copy these setting (both the primary partition and the extended one into the bigger HD I put as a primary slave… yet any combination I tried (and tried a lot, everything I could think about, moving, resizing, leaving extra room unallocated…) - gave me an error saying (referring to the /dev/sda5 copying only) - the source is bigger than the destination and therefore the copying did not work… (I suspect it might be related to this: [GParted -- Download](http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php) ) Anyway, when I try to copy only the primary partition and resizing it to the new bigger HD it works fine…but when I try to boot with the new image as a primary master (after removing the smaller old vdi file) - I get a blank black screen with a white underscore at the top left (there’s a better name to it I think… just can’t recall it now…). So - I did some reading… these tutorials I mentioned had people also having similar problems… I tried: 1) botting with the original image as primary master and the new bigger one as primary slave… it works, but I’m not sure this is ok and being a newbie I don’t know whether that’s a good thing to do and what are the consequences… anyway, I saw some people mentioning runing this configuration (master & slave as described) and then running Roadkil’s BootBuilder and following some additional steps - [Download Roadkil's Boot Builder - MajorGeeks](http://www.majorgeeks.com/Roadkils_Boot_Builder_d4980.html) ) when trying to run this file I’m greeted with this message for running the exe file: “Unable to find an interpreter for ./bootbuild.exe” or when trying to run the zip (from terminal that is) I get: “invalid file (bad magic number): Exec format error”… trying to run from Nautilus did not cause this thing to work (I did add execution permissions since at first I seemed to have no executing permission on this file and had different errors) so - that did not do the work for me… I realise what’s happening is the new HD has no boot sector… tried to read about GRUB but was afraid to do some more damage as I really don’t feel I understand enough right now about Linux to do this, unless you guys tell me I should (plus maybe some guildelines which may help a bit…) anyway, I did read but wasn’t sure it was the solution I should study and follow… I also tried to download Linux Mint 8 Helena CD from the website and boot from there… I couldn’t do anything useful booting from the Compatibility mode… it did not have a recovery mode… so used the regular mode… where the farthest I reached was to see I had another HD containing more GB (resized to 40GB… so saw something containing 38GB)… but didn’t know where to go from there and even how to access it and how to repair the boot information there… also tried to run in this config GParted (saw the CD of Helena had it) - but for some reason it did not run or do anything and anyway - Ifelt I was improvising too much for my beginner level…) So - this is where I’m at… pretty stuck. If anybody here can tell me how should this be done (if at all… ), I’d greatly (really!!) appreciate it… Otherwise, if there’s no way to resize the Virtual Rails partition to a bigger one or if there’s no other bigger version (perhaps from a DVD installation and not a CD one with less things on it (like OpenJDK instead of Sun Java for instance…) - I’ll switch to a different solution - and in which case (still I’d love to know and learn how the problem I described above should be solved…) - I wonder if there are any recommendations you could share… I simoltaneously installed a fresh Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on my VB (with 100GB _grin_) thinking I should be doing the whole configuration and stuff by myself now… I’m planning to follow mainly the tutorials from Rails Wiki - [http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/getting-started/installation/linux](http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/getting-started/installation/linux) - and Ubuntu RoR page - [RubyOnRails - Community Help Wiki](https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RubyOnRails) - hoping the knowledge I’ve gained so far will be sufficient to be able to do this correctly… even these two links do not completely overlap and there some more alternate ways I found… so I mainly feel insecure here and very eager to be able to go back to study RoR and write some code as well (while learning linux and using it) So - hope this post was clear enough… I’d greatly appreciate your answers. Many thanks! Best, tino ---
**Author:** ![tinoD](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/4da419/32.png) [@tinoD](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/tinoD)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2010, 9:12am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/resizing-the-virtual-rails-image-file-newb/191661/2 "2010-07-27T09:12:02Z")
Hi Tino, I haven’t had the time to digg into this for now, but i wonder : why not using the virtualbox “shared folders” ? is an easy way to gain access of the underlying host OS from the virtual os, including extra disk space. you can find more informations about the shared folders here : [VirtualBox - Community Help Wiki](https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VirtualBox#Sharing) Folders Between Host and Guest [http://blogs.sun.com/tao/entry/virtual\_box\_shared\_folder\_between](http://blogs.sun.com/tao/entry/virtual_box_shared_folder_between) ---
**Author:** ![tinoD](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/4da419/32.png) [@tinoD](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/tinoD)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2010, 10:27am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/resizing-the-virtual-rails-image-file-newb/191661/3 "2010-07-27T10:27:34Z")
Hi Jerome, Thank you for replying 🙂 On Jul 26, 9:34 pm, Jerome F. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > Hi Tino, > > I haven’t had the time to digg into this for now, but i wonder : > > why not using the virtualbox “shared folders” ? > is an easy way to gain access of the underlying host OS from the > virtual os, including extra disk space. > you can find more informations about the shared folders here : well, at the time when being a complete beginner (which I still am, but plus about two weeks of playing around and getting stuck and learning, and doing some more mistakes, and learning, and so on… which I’m actually happy about, learned a lot, [despite the frustration I felt/expressed a few times], much with the very-much- appreciated-help of people in these lists and forums 🙂 ) - anyway, at the time I wasn’t sure whether this is a reasonable solution or what should be done in such a case… therefore I asked the experienced ones to learn best practices and get corrections in the places I do mistakes… I also posted the same question in c.o.l.setup. Posting here the link rather than adding short descriptions of the suggested solutions since I feel they better stay in the original responders’ words, along with their emphasizings, and since I feel I do not wish to make mistakes in explaining the solutions (being after all a newbie): [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.setup/browse\_frm/thread/6ff2b84aaeb4845d/048a03ef268a1f03?lnk=gst&q=newbie#048a03ef268a1f03](http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.linux.setup/browse_frm/thread/6ff2b84aaeb4845d/048a03ef268a1f03?lnk=gst&q=newbie#048a03ef268a1f03) > [VirtualBox - Community Help Wiki](https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VirtualBox#SharingFolders) Between > Host and Guesthttp://blogs.sun.com/tao/entry/virtual\_box\_shared\_folder\_between Thank you for the links! and thanks again for finding this thread and answering… appreciate it 🙂 best, tino. – tino. ---
**Author:** ![tinoD](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/4da419/32.png) [@tinoD](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/tinoD)\ **Post date:** [July 27, 2010, 3:58pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/resizing-the-virtual-rails-image-file-newb/191661/4 "2010-07-27T15:58:19Z")
Hi Tino, allright, hope you finally succeeded in what you wanted to do 🙂 I wrote you a personnal mail few days ago, about some of your questions, but never had a reply from you. hence I wonder if you ever received it ? cheers, Jérôme ---
**Author:** ![tinoD](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/4da419/32.png) [@tinoD](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/tinoD)\ **Post date:** [July 28, 2010, 5:40pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/resizing-the-virtual-rails-image-file-newb/191661/5 "2010-07-28T17:40:56Z")
Hi Jerome, On Jul 27, 4:57 pm, Jerome F. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > Hi Tino, > > allright, hope you finally succeeded in what you wanted to do 🙂 > I wrote you a personnal mail few days ago, about some of your > questions, but never had a reply from you. > hence I wonder if you ever received it ? Ah… I just saw it after reading your post here… I apologise(!!) - my email wasn’t configured the way it should have been, thus your reply was forwarded to the wrong email address… I thank you for your reply. I moved on since asking the above mentioned password-question(came back to a working backup I had). I did keep the vdi in case you return to me, to try a suggested solution, which I did right now and still - no go. I wonder what is the reason… but it’s not the keyboard qwerty vs. azerty issue (though when read your reply I thought ‘how silly of me not to think about that option myself’… but it did not work, sadly). thanks again 🙂 best, tino.