VMDK file size does not match what is actually on the disk

[MitchReynolds]

Hello,

I am a new user with VMWARE and my hard drive in Vista says the VMware file for my guest OS is 18Gb, however when I am in the Guest OS, it says it is only 6 Gbs or so. Is there anything I can do to help reduce the size on my HOST OS because its eating up a lot of space without actually having any data. I did not pre-allocate the disk space either. I would like to pre-allocate if I can, even though I have already installed the guest OS. I also tried to clone it, however it did not work. Can anyone help? Sorry for the long post.

Mitch

[bigvee]

Are you running VMware server? Workstation?

When you create the VM it should ask for the size HDD to create. After that the space represented to the OS is whatever you formatted it to.

[MitchReynolds]

I guess my real question is, at one time the guest OS was using all 18Gb of what is shown being used in the HOST. However , I deleted the data out of the GUEST. Does that, then basically leave it as pre-allocated space?

I am running Vista Home Premium as the HOST and Win2KPro as the Guest.

[MitchReynolds]

Sorry, I am running VMWare Workstation.

[bigvee · Accepted solution]

yes... the rest of that space is allocated to the VM.

[KevinG]

Sounds like you are using a growable virtual disk. You can reclaim the space on your host by running defrag and shrink on the virtual disk.

Instructions for this are in the VMware workstation documentation.

[MitchReynolds]

Thanks so much! I really appreciate it!

[RDPetruska]

You can use the shrink command (either in the VMware Toolbox, or offline with the vmware-vdiskmanager utility) to reclaim some/most of that space. You'll probably want to defragment it first.

[MitchReynolds]

I did defrag it however trying to use the vdisk utility, it just popped up for a second then went away. I was unable to find the shrink utility. Can you give me a better description of how I need to get to it?

[RDPetruska]

a. In the guest, double-click the VMware Tools tray icon. One of the tabs is Shrink. Select the partition you wish to shrink, and it will.

-or-

b. With the guest powered off, run the vmware-vdiskmanager utility (from a command prompt, or use my Windows GUI wrapper - see my profile for website) with the -k paramter (I think). Run it with no parameters for help/syntax and examples.

Rob

[KevinG]

Defragmenting Virtual Disks

http://www.vmware.com/support/ws55/doc/ws_disk_defrag.html

Shrinking Virtual Disks

http://www.vmware.com/support/ws55/doc/ws_disk_shrink.html

[MitchReynolds]

Thank you very much! You guys have been EXTREMELY helpful. I think I have found everything I need to know!!

[ahmedragab1]

How ?

[RDPetruska]

Number 1 - How what?

Number 2 - you posted to revive a 15-year old thread.  Might want to just create a new one to ask your question, as I'm 100% certain that your scenario is different (Workstation version, host OS, guest OS, etc.).