#170 Clonezilla recognizes VirtualBox virtual machine disks that are larger than they actually are

[santopitar]

Hello. I run maintenance for a high school. I have different builds for different PC profiles (W10+Apps, W10.Apps+LinuxMint.Apps, etc...).

I make images of the builds with Clonezilla so that I can restore them to the corresponding machines. I have the problem that when I want to update the operating systems that are in the images from last year, I can't do them for the computers that are in use because they have already been modified by the users. What I was doing so far is restoring last year's image, updating the OS, and recreating a new, updated image.

So I thought I'd create virtual machines with VirtualBox to restore the images to, and keep the virtual machines clean as master installations, which I can update every year and then create a new, updated Clonezilla image of them. So far, so good. Clonezilla works with virtual machines but has a problem. It recognizes VirtualBox disks that are larger than they really are (a 120GB virtual disk is recognized as 128GB).

This causes the images it generates of the virtual disks to be larger than the original disk, so they cannot be restored to the original physical disk. It has a solution but it is complicated (reduce the installation partitions, then reduce the size of the disk and recreate the image with Clonezilla). Any idea why this happens? Is there an easier solution? Thanks in advance.