Sizing Issues

[SlammingBuddha]

Hi,
Im having a prob with the virtual size of my VDI. I initially made it small to fit on a SSD but then decided to move it to a TB HD
I did this ok and increased the size but must have got the numbers wrong on the command as the virtual size now read as 8.47 TB instead of the 900GB i was looking for. (Although inside the windows XP guest it read the HDD as 574GB which I increased the primary partition to fill)
So i used the compact command and now it reads the same Virtual Size of 8.47TB but only 26.6GB Actual Size.
Can anyone point me how to decrease the Virtual to around 600 or 700 GB?
Or am I worried over nothing as its fine as it is?
Thanks for any help

[mpack]

Compaction has nothing to do with logical disk capacity, compaction has to do with how much host disk space the file takes up, i.e. making sure it uses no more than required for the data it contains.

Provided you have not changed the partitions inside the drive then you can clone the VDI and change the logical size using CloneVDI. You'll need Wine to run this on a Linux host.

[SlammingBuddha]

ok thanks for getting back to me,

So pretty much do what I did to resize it originally up to (by mistake) 8.47TB
Does enlarging the primary partition count as changing? Or do you mean adding, deleting, merging etc?
Thanks again

[mpack]

Does enlarging the primary partition count as changing?

It's the very definition of "changing". CloneVDI will not allow you to shrink a drive below the size needed to contain the partitions present. Obviously it would be catastrophic to allow that.

Even worse, the legacy MBR partitioning scheme couldn't possibly handle an 8.5TB drive, so if you really succeeded in resizing the partition then you can't be using a partitioning scheme which CloneVDI will understand, so you may have to live with your mistakes. At worst you can limit the growth of the drive by simply not including the unwanted capacity in a guest partition.