Inside virtual machine:24gbyte,vmdk file:59 gbyte

[louis14]

‌i use a host Windows 7 home edition with vmware workstation 9.0

i have a virtual machine Windows 8 pro x64

i have upgraded the Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 This caused an enormous grow of my windows 8 vmdk file:this is now 59gbyte

before it was about 10gbyte

when i run the virtual machine Windows 8.1 pro: treesize on it gives 24gbyte of files,explorer gives used:17gbyte and available 42 gbyte for a total of 59gbyte

i have used sdelete on the virtual machine to zero the free space Then i have shutdown the virtual machine and i have runned vmware-vdiskmanager.exe "Windows 8 x64.vmdk" to shrink the vmdk file but the result after 20 minutes was a vmdk file of 59 gbyte

the shrink did not succeeded!

how do i shrink the vmdk file?

[wila]

Hi there,

You should not have had to run sdelete, but since you have, be aware that the options for the sdelete command have changed.

As of version 1.6 you should be using option -z to zero out the space, using -c will not zero it, but instead fill it with random data in accordance with DOD spec: DOD 5220.22-M

--

Wil

[louis14]

‌

[louis14]

yes i have used sdelete.exe -c

so i will now run sdelete.exe -z

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[louis14]

maybe it's  better to run now menu command disk cleanup (i didn't yet run sdelete -z):disk cleanup says:disk space used 59 gbyte,reclaimable space 43gbyte

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[wila · Accepted solution]

That would most likely work yes.

This is why I mentioned that you don't need sdelete as VMware has it's own variant of this in the desktop products.

On a Windows guest and a normal FAT or NTFS filesystem I would expect it to recognize deleted space and wipe it out on your behalf.

But I'm not completely sure how it treats your DOD randomized partition data, probably just wipes it.

--

Wil

[louis14]

the menu command disk cleanup succeeded,now the vmdk file is 16 gbyte, that means 44 gbyte reclaimed.Thanks for your info.Now i know better for the future.

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[wila]

You're welcome.

Most important part is that your problem is resolved.

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Wil