Virtualbox Second Hard Drive [solved]

[viking777]

I use Virtualbox for the very few occasions where I can't do something in Linux, but I underestimated the size of the .vdi file I would need and am now short of space. Most solutions to this problem start with the words 'create a new vdi file of the size you want' . This makes one fundamental assumption which is you have room to do that, well I don't. The only way I can create space for a new vdi file of the size I want is to delete the old one and that is not going to help me boot the vm.

 

I thought I had found a solution which was to create a small second virtual drive and attach that to the vm as a slave drive to give me the extra space I need. This worked perfectly apart from one small flaw. Windows does not recognise the second hard drive. I thought it would turn up as Drive D in 'My Computer' but it doesn't appear at all. If I hover my mouse over the hard drive icon in virtualbox it clearly shows that I have 2 drives attached, but windows only sees 1. The add hardware wizard doesn't help because as far as 'Device Manager' is concerned both drives exist.

 

What do I have to do to make the second drive appear in 'My Computer'?

Edited March 4, 2008 by viking777

[scarecrow]

Did you go into windows volume manager to format the new virtual drive?

By default it has no filesystem (raw) and should be formatted as ntfs or whatever- else windows can't assign a drive letter to it, of course.

[viking777]

:blush: What a fool I am - of course that is the answer!!

Thanks scarecrow, just a few seconds work and now I have a second hard drive to use without deleting the first, just what I wanted.