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Moving and extending VirtualBox virtual machines

Running things on Apple hardware here, all those Windows-only software packages are a somewhat of a pain… As good as they are, both Qlik Sense, some of the vendor specific embedded software IDEs and other need-to-have software are Windows-only.

VirtualBox to the rescue. It is free and works really well  (I do hear good things about Parallels too, though). I have used it for years without any real issues, until recently when I simply ran out of disk space on the host iMac where it lives, as well as in the virtual machine itself. The client OS (Windows 10) simply did not have enough space to download and install service packs.

Time to upgrade.

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Upgrade to Windows 10 on VirtualBox with OSX host

Windows 10Lots of OS upgrades lately, Windows went to Windows 10 and Apple to El Capitan. I am usually pretty ok upgrading to Apple’s latest OSs a week or two after their release – they are usually of good quality.

As VirtualBox (“VBox”) also came out with their version 5 release, it was time to upgrade the Windows 8.1 virtual machine (“VM”) running in VBox, with OS X as host.

Turns out this is (of course..) not as easy as one would think – but still possible.
Here we will walk through the steps of

  • Extending the Windows 8.1 virtual disk in VBox
  • Forcing the Windows 10 installer to run, even though its hardware compatibility checker says the VBox machine is not compatible with Windows 10
  • Installing the VBox Guest Additions in the Windows 10 VM.

Before doing any of those steps, you might want to upgrade to OS X El Capitan, and to latest Virtual Box (5.x as of this writing).

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