Copying data from one VM to another

[thermogl]

Hello.

I'm trying to increase the disk size of a Mac OS VM using the steps outlined in https://github.com/cirruslabs/tart/issues/17#issuecomment-1439367869 however I cannot resize disk0s2 I believe because disk0s3 is a recovery partition.

I get the following error when running diskutil apfs resizeContainer disk0s2 0: "Error -69519: The target disk is too small for this operation, or a gap is required in your partition map..."

I cannot boot the VM into recovery mode to run crsutil disable so I also cannot delete disk0s3.

I figure the only option left is to create a new VM with a larger disk and copy my existing files over. What's the best way to do this?

Alternatively, do I have any other options apart from recreating the VM from scratch? Can I create a new disk, say disk0s4 and move the files to it then use that instead of disk0s2?

[fkorotkov]

Hello @thermogl,

You can try our Packer plugin which can remove partitions directly and can resize disks. I think something like that will the following resize.pkr.hcl work:

packer {
  required_plugins {
    tart = {
      version = ">= 1.12.0"
      source  = "github.com/cirruslabs/tart"
    }
  }
}

source "tart-cli" "tart" {
  vm_base_name = "my-vm"
  vm_name      = "my-new-vm"
  cpu_count    = 4
  memory_gb    = 8
  disk_size_gb = 50
  ssh_password = "admin"
  ssh_username = "admin"
  ssh_timeout  = "120s"
}

build {
  sources = ["source.tart-cli.tart"]
}

Please replace my-vm and my-new-vm and then run:

brew install hashicorp/tap/packer
packer init resize.pkr.hcl
packer build resize.pkr.hcl

[thermogl]

Thank you!

Have tried this and it sort of works, in that it deletes the recovery partition, but disk0s2 hasn't been expanded to the new size. I can then run diskutil apfs resizeContainer disk0s2 0 inside the VM and it seems to succeed (Growing APFS Physical Store disk0s2 from 74,107,002,088 to 149,475,672,064 bytes), but when I re-run diskutil list I can see that it hasn't actually resized.

Any ideas how to fix that?

[thermogl]

Ah, had to run repairDisk first. Thanks for all the help!