virtualbox.org

I have a vdi file (growing) with ntfs partition of size 4GB, used up 2GB now, but takes 3GB of spaces on my host machine.

I used but it didn't seem shrinking at all.

I De-registed the vdi file before shrinking, but it didn't help either

any idea ?

You need to zero out the freespace before applying the command. This requires some 3rd party utility for Windows.

By the means of "zero-out", are you saying "de-fragment" ?

No, zero out free space just means that the free space must be filled with zeroes. There are several tools which can do this, e.g. SDelete (http://www.microsoft.com/germany/techne ... elete.mspx), for which you need to specify the parameter -z to zero out free space.

Thank you all.

I have tried SDelete from Extract it, run it within the guest OS with -c instead of -z: and shutdown the guest OS and virtualbox
then and it works.

Thanks again.

In case you thought vditool was installed with VirtualBox our thoughts match!

vditool is available for download here (choose Save As):
http://www.virtualbox.org/download/testcase/vditool

thanks to thedarkmaster:
http://thedarkmaster.wordpress.com/2007 ... on-how-to/