Fedora install in Virtualbox expands to fill drive

Question

I recently completed a Fedora 19 install on an 8GB virtual drive in VirtualBox.

For some reason though, it appears as though I have run out of space! Surely my 951MB Fedora .iso can't have expanded to 7.51GB?

It's as if the filesystem is "expanding" to fill whatever space it is allotted.

It appears as though I am not the only one experiencing this issue, but so far there has yet to be a satisfactory resolution to this issue.

How can this be fixed?

df -h output:

Filesystem               Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/fedora-root  3.5G  3.4G  6.9M 100% /
devtmpfs                 2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /dev
tmpfs                    2.0G  424K  2.0G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs                    2.0G  740K  2.0G   1% /run
tmpfs                    2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs                    2.0G   40K  2.0G   1% /tmp
/dev/sda1                477M   82M  370M  19% /boot

Disk usage analyzer output:

GParted output:

Answer 1

You started with 8GB

• 500 MB boot partitition

The rest (7.5GB) is in a LVM volume. It consists of

• 3.5 GB root partition (mounted under /)

• 4 GB swap (presumably, you haven't shown but I guess thats what it is).

Unix needs swap, and especially if your VM has tons of RAM assigned then the amount of disk space is a bit small.

In any case, your Fedora installation filled up the 3.5GB. Thats a not a unreasonable size for a install with desktop environment. Its easy to unpack 950MB of compressed rpms into that.

If you want to remove the swap, you can swapoff -a and then use lvm to resize the partition. But on a reasonably modern computer I would just reinstall the VM with a realistic amount of disk space.