Can't shrink Windows 8.1 VM

[Pbryanw]

Hi,

I'm currently trialling Fusion 6 and made a Windows 8 VM, which I've upgraded to 8.1. I then used Disk Clean-up from within Windows to delete my install files and logs. Windows now reports that 17.9Gb of space is being used on the main drive. However, the VM is taking up 30.9Gb on my Mac's hard-disk and I don't know the reason for this discrepancy?

After shutting down the VM, "Clean Up Virtual Machine" is greyed out in settings and none of the drive is marked as reclaimable. I've also tried running the command: "VMwareToolboxCmd disk shrinkonly" from within the VM but only recovered 0.2Gb this way.

I'm running Windows 8.1 using an EFI boot and a SATA expanding disk which is not preallocated or split into 2GB files.

Any help reclaiming this space or explaining why I'm experiencing this would be appreciated.

[admin]

Hi Pbryanw,

Thanks for using the Fusion.

As far as I know, the UI "Cleap up Virtual Machine" is support by NTFS partition, you can check the disk format first.

BTW, the pre-allocated disk is also not supported Clean up. You can also check whether you have snapshot or not, snapshot will also occupy some space in the disk. Help it is a help for you.

[Pbryanw]

Hi, thanks for your reply & help with this. Windows installer made three partitions on the virtual drive - Recovery, EFI and an NTFS main drive. Also the Hard-Disk is not pre-allocated and I'm not using snapshots.

Ideally I'd like to recover some of the unused space as I use an relatively small SSD, but I can probably cope with a slightly larger VM if needs be.

[Pbryanw · Accepted solution]

Hi,

I've managed to shrink the VM from 35.09GB to 13.76GB.

To do this I had to go into the VM and then enter the following into a command prompt:

cd C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Tools

VMwareToolboxCmd.exe disk shrink c:\

So running VMwareToolboxCmd.exe disk shrinkonly instead of shrink c:\ was the problem for me.