Virtual disk size versus virtual disk contents

[bicster]

Hi all,

I'm new to all things VM so apologies in advance if this is a dumb question.

I have configured a Windows XP SP3 VM and installed various development tools (like Eclipse and what not). When I power on the VM and look at the hard disk it shows as being a 40Gb drive with 30Gb free (indicating 10Gb of data). I only have one virtual disk configured for this VM.

However, when I view the VM files on my host OS the virtual disk file is over 21Gb!

This drive is not pre-allocated so I wouldn't expect it to take up over twice the amount of data the OS is reporting. I have tried compacting the drive (via VM workstation (ver 7.1)) but that doesn't seem to help.

Any ideas?

Chris

[AWo]

Welcome to the forums!

If the actual vmdk file size is 21 GB the virtual disk has reached that size once (in th epast). It doesn't shrink automatically. That has to be done manually if the usage is lower than the physical disk size again.

Run Sysinternals "sdelete" to zero-out the unused space in the guest and after that use the shrink option to get it back to a smaller size.

AWo