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3 Replies Last post: Jan 18, 2009 8:14 PM by WoodyZ
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how to reduce the VMWare Virtual Machine folder size

Jan 18, 2009 4:41 PM

Click to view kunalyadav's profile Enthusiast kunalyadav 33 posts since
Jul 17, 2008
Hi,
While creating my VMWare Virtual machine I have specified the maximum size as 40 GB. And now it is taking 40GB of my hard-disk space. Though the real size of my Windows C drive is 14 GB. Statistics in Windows OS shows 14 GB used and 26GB free. I want my virtual machine folder to use only 14 GB (that is the actual size) on my hard disk and release rest for MAC to use. And size should inly increase if i load more data in windows. Please help me out ..
Reply Re: how to reduce the VMWare Virtual Machine folder size Jan 18, 2009 4:52 PM
Click to view wila's profile Virtuoso wila 3,207 posts since
Jun 27, 2006
Hi,

You can use this tool: vdiskmanager GUI to change your preallocated disk (which you appear to have) over to a growable disk with 2GB split disks.
After the conversion use the shrink option in your guest vmware tools to reclaim even more unused disk space.
As with all of these type of actions, do take a backup of your VM -with the VM and Fusion shut down- before you start out if your VM has any valuable data.


--
Wil
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Visit the new VMware developers wiki at http://www.vi-toolkit.com
Reply Re: how to reduce the VMWare Virtual Machine folder size Jan 18, 2009 6:16 PM
in response to: wila
Click to view kunalyadav's profile Enthusiast kunalyadav 33 posts since
Jul 17, 2008
When I open my VMWear file name "Window XP Professional" with "Show package Content" option I found that there are around 21 files i.e. Windows XP Professional S001 to S0021.VMDK each of 2 GB that is making this file as 40 GB on my hard disk .. Though the C Drive in Windows shows as 14 GB. Please find the file attached and help me out how to reduce the size .
Thanks !
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Reply Re: how to reduce the VMWare Virtual Machine folder size Jan 18, 2009 8:14 PM
in response to: kunalyadav
Click to view WoodyZ's profile Guru WoodyZ 9,999 posts since
Apr 22, 2004
kunalyadav wrote: Please find the file attached and help me out how to reduce the size

FWIW if you going to attach a file showing the contents of the Virtual Machine Package it is better and certainly more informative to change to List View. Not need to change this picture since you already stated they are 2 GB in size on the .vmdk files which means the Virtual Hard Disk is preallocated and if you want to regain some space you going to have to convert the preallocated disk to a growable disk as wila has already pointed out.

Note: Make sure you backup the Virtual Machine Package before you do anything and you need lots of free space to both backup and do the conversion so hope you have an external drive to work with if you don't have adequate space internally.
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