How to Resize Raspbian Image for QEMU on Windows

Raspbian is a free operating system based on Debian. It is the recommended operating system for Raspberry Pi. If you do not have a Raspberry Pi, you can experience Raspbian by running the OS image in the emulator – QEMU. In this article, I want to share how to resize the Raspbian image on Windows.

Raspbian and QEMU for Windows

Download the package.

Why do I Need to Resize the Raspbian Image?

The Raspbian image contained in the package is not the latest. Therefore, I want to upgrade the OS with following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Unluckily, when I was trying to upgrade the system, I suffered the lack of space.

How much storage space can I use? Get the available disk space as follows:

df -h

Here is the way I tried in order to free up space:

sudo apt-get clean

The outcome is storage space is still not enough. The only solution is to add extra space.

Adding Storage Space to Raspbian Image File (*.img)

According to the answer from StackOverflow, I have verified the steps on Windows:

Steps to resize the *.img file

Install Ubuntu on Windows 10.

Check the original image size and resize it with command ‘truncate’:

truncate -s +2G raspbian.img

List the partition tables for the image file:

 fdisk -l raspbian.img

Although the image size changes to 3.8G, the partition is still 1.8G. We need to re-partition the disk with ‘fdisk’:

fdisk raspbian.img

Use ‘d’ to delete the second partition and use ‘p’ to print the current partition tables.

Create a new partition with ‘n’:

The start sector of the second partition is 122880. Don’t forget to enter ‘w’ to commit the change.

The final step is to use ‘resize2fs’ to resize the ext4 (check the file system type with command ‘df -T’) file system.

We need to use ‘losetup’ to mount the image. To find an unused loop device, use the following command:

losetup -f

Unfortunately, it failed. Here is the error message I got:

losetup: cannot find an unused loop device: No such file or directory.

There are no /dev/loop* devices! The function is not supported on Windows 10 yet. The good news is the feature has been listed on the user voice.

Now I have to process the image file in a Linux virtual machine.

Boot QEMU with the new image file:

Extra storage space is added.

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