How to resize a NTFS qemu qcow2 image (the easy way)
There's so much bad information out there how to simply resize a NTFS qemu qcow2 (windows in kvm) image, and I need to frequently enhance my windows images, esp. on win8 (64 bit) so I'll document it here for the next time:
- Don't use fdisk if you have gparted!
- Don't waste space converting a qcow2 to raw
Shutdown the vm!
$ sudo su -
- $ ls /var/lib/libvirt/images/*.qcow2
$ qemu-img resize /var/lib/libvirt/images/windows_x64.qcow2 +5GB
$ modprobe nbd max_part=63
$ qemu-nbd -c /dev/nbd0 /var/lib/libvirt/images/windows_x64.qcow2
$ # fdisk -l /dev/nbd0 # or better
- $ kpartx /dev/nbd0 # to check the partitions and sizes
$ ntfsresize --info /dev/nbd0 # to check if the volumes are not dirty
$ gparted /dev/nbd0 # enhance the partition size to max
$ killall qemu-nbd
Start the vm and let windows do the chkdsk /f (in win8 automatically)
- In winxp you might need to do
ntfsresize -x /dev/nbd0p2manually
Working at cPanel on cperl, B::C (the perl-compiler), parrot, B::Generate, cygwin perl and more guts, keeping the system alive.
# apt-get install libguestfs-tools
# virt-resize --expand /dev/sda2 /dev/vg_pin/Win7x32old /dev/vg_pin/Win7x32
"qemu-img resize" is perfect! Parted rulez! Cheers! :-)
Awesome! Been trying to find that qemu-img command. I there any reason not to use a gparted-live iso in the VM instead of mucking about with NBD?