How To: Expand HDD after creating initial image

[drew15b]

I wanted to create the following guide to save people some time researching the various ways of expanding the virtual disk. 

Use Case:

If you end up using one of the disk images supplied by XEMU team or used too small of a disk size for your use case originally, this guide will be helpful if you need to expand the virtual drive.

Prerequisites:

1. Operating System:
   1. Linux
      1. Debian Variants: apt install qemu-utils
   2. Windows (WSL2) - This guide will not cover how to set this up.
      1. Debian / Ubuntu: apt install qemu-utils
   3. macOS
      1. Hombebrew: brew install qemu
2. Binary: qemu-img (see simplified instructions above to obtain)
3. Xemu Configuration: <-- I suggest using this over gparted as XBpartitioner will automatically apply the correct cluster size for XBOX depending on how large you make the partitions.
   Note: Many of these tools are available to install using TruHeXEn 2024.
   1. Dashboard: Custom Installed (I use Cerbios (Pandora) + XMBC4XBOX (TruHeXEn))
   2. Application: XBpartitioner 1.3 (TruHeXEn)

Considerations

• Hard drive that contains .qcow2 image should probably be able to support whatever size you are resizing the virtual disk image to. That being said, these virtual disks are dynamic so it will not take up the actual HDD space until files are created within the virtual disk.
• MBR has a maximum file size of ~2TB so I believe this is the maximum size limit that can utilized.

Steps

1. Stop XEMU if it is open.
2. Open Terminal and run the following command:
   Note: replace +200G with whatever size you want.
   1. qemu-img resize <path/to/file>.<filename>.qcow2 +200G
3. Open XEMU and launch your preferred Custom Dashboard.
4. Open XBpartitioner 1.3
5. Resize F (6) and / or G (7) to the size limits you want using the DPAD. Press Start button when ready. THIS WILL WIPE THE DISKS THAT ARE RESIZED, USE EXTREME CAUTION.
   Note: I noticed that if I didn't leave a little free space within each partition I was resizing it would not write the full size to disk.
6. Reboot and verify disk size in custom dashboard.

Afterwords

At the time of writing, XEMU doesn't support an easy way to move from ISO to ISO using controller only. You can use other tools to mount any of your legally obtained ISO's within XEMU and copy them to the HDD (DVD2Box). You can then use your custom dashboard to navigate through all the ISO's on your virtual HDD to mount and launch them.

• XEMU appears to have issues with long filenames just as XBOX did, so you may need to copy your ISO's to your HDD with DVDBox using ISO format instead of standard copy format.

Reference: https://superuser.com/questions/24838/is-it-possible-to-resize-a-qemu-disk-image 

Edited April 3 by drew15b