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Toivonen
Contributor
Contributor

Windows XP image is over twice the size of actual installation

I was freeing space from my MBP and noticed that my Windows XP Pro -image file is 25,29GB size. When I open virtual machine there's only ap. 10GB used.

C: total size 19,9GB free space 9,6GB

😧 total size 29,9GB free space 29,2GB

I've had some DVD-images and old mail items I cleaned away about a week ago. I have done shutdown of Windows and restarted. I did delete snapshot images (there's no images now). Nothing helps... I'm still missing ap. 15GB of disk space.

How can I recover this space? Do I need export virtual image to external drive and then re-import or just re-import?

I know in VMware -windows version there's disk tool that defragments image, but I can't find such in Fusion.

Thanks for any help...

____

Tomi

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WoodyZ
Immortal
Immortal

I was freeing space from my MBP and noticed that my Windows XP Pro -image file is 25,29GB size. When I open virtual machine there's only ap. 10GB used.

C: total size 19,9GB free space 9,6GB

😧 total size 29,9GB free space 29,2GB

I've had some DVD-images and old mail items I cleaned away about a week ago. I have done shutdown of Windows and restarted. I did delete snapshot images (there's no images now). Nothing helps... I'm still missing ap. 15GB of disk space.

How can I recover this space?

If these are sparse disks (growable) and you have discarded the snapshot then you should be able to boot into the Guest OS and use the shrink feature of VMware Tools. If the disks are flat disks (pre-alocated) then the shrink feature is not applicable.

Note: I believe you must have at least the amount of space that the new shrunk disk will take in order to successfully complete the shrink operation so if you are extremely low on disk space be careful as I don't remember if you're warned about lack of space before the actual shrink operation begins.

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Toivonen
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks, WoodyZ

I got more that 80GB free space, so that should not be a problem.

Where can I find "shrink-command"?

I've got GestOS running, but cannot find it.

Running version 1.1.1 (72241)

____

Tomi

Edit. I don't have pre-allocated harddisks, just for this reason I thought that I'll save space when not needed.

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WoodyZ
Immortal
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Where can I find "shrink-command"?

VMware Fusion menu bar > Help > VMware Fusion Help > Creating Virtual Machines > Configuring VMware Tools

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Toivonen
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks, WoodyZ

I found it, but it seems that it requires enough free space in the same Windows -partition that I'm shrinking. And of course, I'm missing a few megabytes. It's so close that while running this I could move something to another partition or to USB-drive, but does this happen again later. Do I need to do this regular basis to keep it tidy, or is this "preparing for shrinking" one time only job?

Is there any way to resize Windows-partition? Or do I need to re-install all to get this working... that's too bad. I've got a lot of VPN & other company software to configure... takes a few days to finnish all. Or is there a way to create a new Virtual image that has larger partition, and then import this image to that?

I know... it was my mistake to do such small partition, but I realized that just after installing.

____

Tomi

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

I found it, but it seems that it requires enough free space in the same Windows -partition that I'm shrinking. And of course, I'm missing a few megabytes. It's so close that while running this I could move something to another partition or to USB-drive, but does this happen again later. Do I need to do this regular basis to keep it tidy, or is this "preparing for shrinking" one time only job?

Shrinking requires free space on the host, not in the virtual machine. The "preparing for shrinking" needs to be done every time you shrink the disk.

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Toivonen
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks for you reply, etung.

When I was doing shrinking, I got an error message at the end of run. Also got message that disk space in drive C: is running low. I could not finish that shrinking until I did remove some software from C: to get more free space. When it was ap. 49% used and 51% free, shrinking did finish succesfully. So I assume that there have to be enough space on virtual partition, also.

I did install a second copy of WinXP and did shrink it at the start. Now, when running that image, image file (looked in OSX) is ap. 4,5GB. But after shutting down virtual machine image shrinks to 2,5GB. I'm not sure if this means it works now all the time.

I'll just have to keep my eye on this for a while to see how it goes.

I'll do shinking later again with this new XP to see if it will shrink image more that after just shutting down.

I will update my experience here later.

Thanks, etung & WoodyZ

____

Tomi

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