Product: VirtualBox
Version: 4.3.4 r91027
Host: Windows 8
Guest: ArchLinux 2013.12.01
The hard disk that I added to this VM is a SATA drive with 1G capacity and this hard disk uses dynamic storage. On Windows, I see that this VDI disk (which contains the OS) consumes just 700M of space. However, after installing Arch on this disk and by using the command df -H, I find that the disk is 99% full and consuming a total of 942M. The available space is 27M. But… But… When I execute
dd if=/dev/zero of=dummyfile count=1 bs=104857600
only an 80M file gets created. If you look at the command, you will see that I’m trying to create a 100M file. Just to be sure that the disk is actually full, I copy this file to another filename
cp dummyfile anotherdummyfile
and just as expected, the error pops up stating that the disk is full. Irritating, yet interesting! I’m gonna have to explore more on this and if this situation hasn’t been explained or covered in a bug report, I will post a bug.
If you already know why this is happening or a link to a bug report that addresses this, drop in a reference in this post. It will help me improve this KB.
[UPDATE]
I just discovered that the hard disk was actually full. The reason behind the hard disk being full is the swapfile. I had created a swapfile and not a swap partition and this swapfile was 256MB in size. Pretty dumb of me if you think about it!
Subhankar Sett's knowledge base 