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I'm having a ton of memory issues with VirtualBox (4.3.14) running Windows 7. These include:

  • On startup, I get the following error: "Windows created a temporary paging file on your computer because of a a problem that occurred with your paging file configuration when you started your computer. The total paging file size for all disk drives may be somewhat larger than the size you specified."
  • Excel (2013) runs out of memory a lot. Example: Try to save file (~5 MB max) and get "Disk is full" error.
  • I can't upgrade or uninstall Skype because: "An error occurred while writing installation information to disk. Check to make sure enough disk space is available and click Retry or Cancel the Install."

I've fooled with the VM settings a little bit (experimenting with "nested paging"), but otherwise haven't done much.

Native machine:

  • Mac OSX 10.9.4
  • 16 GB RAM
  • 500 GB hard drive

VM specs

  • VirtualBox (just upgraded, 4.3.14)
  • Windows 7 (64 bit)
  • Office 2013 (64 bit)
  • 8 GB RAM
  • 50 GB dedicated

Not to detract from Throium's excellent response below, but this reference gives a step-by-step how-to: http://trivialproof.blogspot.com/2011/01/resizing-virtualbox-virtual-hard-disk.html

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  • A perfectly valid answer to the question may be: Install VMWare fusion and use the settings out of the box, if the solution takes more than 1-2 hours of tinkering.
    – BenDundee
    Sep 1, 2014 at 18:41

2 Answers 2

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Confirm that you have enough free disk space on your computer.

If you created the virtual disk as a dynamic size hard disk, VirtualBox does not allocate all tehe 50GB upfront, but will allocate it when needed. If your computer runs out of space, VirtualBox will not be able to enlarge the disk, and those errors can occur.

This is one downsize of dynamic sized disk. The other is that the performance is worse than fixed size: every time your disk grows, there's a sensible performance penalty, as you may try to create a 10MB file, and VirtualBox ends up allocating several times more because it have to grow the disk.

To change from a dynamic disk to a fixed one, run vboxmanage clonehd olddisk.vdi newdisk.vdi --variant fixed and change the primary disk from your VM from olddisk to newdisk. If you want to use the GUI, access the Virtual Media Manager on VirtualBox, and copy the old disk to the new one, and select "Fixed size" on the destination.

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  • So I cloned the disk, removed the old disk (from the Settings -> Storage screen), added the new disk and the problem persists. It seems that the issue is that VB isn't finding the new hard drive--when I open the virtual machine, it still shows a 25 GB hard drive under My Computer. (This was the size I chose for the HD when I built the VM, I resized it some time ago, but it's still finding the old settings somehow.)
    – BenDundee
    Sep 1, 2014 at 19:35
  • If you cloned the old disk to a new one, it will have the exact size of the older disk (25GB, not 50GB). You must see the free space on the disk inside the virtual machine too.
    – ThoriumBR
    Sep 1, 2014 at 19:38
  • Got it. My Windows tinkering days are pretty far behind me, so for the weary traveler: howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/…
    – BenDundee
    Sep 1, 2014 at 19:51
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I was having the same problem. I was able to make it stop happening simply by cleaning the cruft out of my temp directories: C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Temp and C:\Windows\Temp. Obviously, this is a temporary solution as this cruft will undoubtedly build up again.

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