CloneVDI tool - Discussion & Support

[mpack]

Thank for your the feedback, and you're welcome.

[Stamimail]

I found something better in the command line
VBoxManage modifymedium [disk|dvd|floppy] <uuid|filename> [--compact]

I had no free space in my Disk.
CloneVdi says [Source and Destination are the same]: "Not enough free space on destination drive"
VBoxManage modifymedium [disk|dvd|floppy] <uuid|filename> [--compact]: does the work.

[socratis]

I found something better completely different and unrelated in the command line, not to clone a VDI but to shrink my existing VDI.

There... I fixed that for you.

You were thinking of a very specific use of CloneVDI, one which is a side-effect of its normal operation (cloning). You didn't even want to clone a VDI to begin with, you wanted to get rid of the unused clusters by "tricking" CloneVDI to overwrite the original disk with the new, compacted one. You forgot that CloneVDI does NOT do its operations in place, it always creates a copy of the original VDI, and you couldn't afford that copy due to limited space.

[Stamimail]

I didn't come to insult, if that was your thinking.

[mpack]

As Socratis points out, CloneVDI always makes a clone of the original. I never do in-place mods, making it impossible for me to ever corrupt the original VDI, no matter what bugs might be present or what hardware glitches might occur. This was an original design goal for CloneVDI and I regard it as a big plus. People who disagree with this design goal should use another tool.

Btw, this topic is reserved for CloneVDI discussion and support. Please don't use it to discuss other tools, or cloning in general. In this case I've treated your post as an implied suggestion that CloneVDI should do in-place mods and addressed that.

[golfradio]

Hi, first of all thanks for your effort and sharing the tool. To be honest, I really haven't taken the time to understand the basics of dynamic disks, so I am asking a newbie question. But please bear with me.

I have a dynamic VDI showing a virtual size of 250G and a disk size of 116G. Inside the machine (running OL7), df -h shows 49G used. Here's the output:

$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs        4.9G     0  4.9G   0% /dev
tmpfs           4.9G  1.2M  4.9G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs           4.9G  8.5M  4.9G   1% /run
tmpfs           4.9G     0  4.9G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda3       248G   49G  199G  20% /
/dev/sda1       497M  267M  231M  54% /boot
shared          322G  185G  138G  58% /media/sf_shared
tmpfs          1000M   16K 1000M   1% /run/user/1001

When I cloned the disk, I selected the option to compact. The process successfully completed but the cloned disk shows a disk size of 111G. I was expecting it to be closer to 49G given the actual physical data in the disk. Why don't I see a smaller cloned disk?

[mpack]

Much of the data on the disk may be outside the filesystem areas which CloneVDI can compact. For example, Linux guests often reserve (and write to) a large area of the disk set aside as a swap partition. Also, if you use LVM (I can't tell, I'm not a Linux user) then CloneVDI can't access the disk internals at all, it can only fall back to VBoxManage type processing.

[oldtexan]

Thank you very much for this tool. I just cloned my old XP and am now using it's programs on my Windows 10 64 bit Dell PC perfectly..

[mpack]

You used CloneVDI's (admittedly clumsy) P2V features to clone a physical PC? That's interesting to hear - I assumed I was the only one who ever used that feature.

[kpm]

Hi,

Your tool (with lots of careful backups and testing!) allowed me to expand a virtual disk while also converting it to dynamic mode.
Bravo sir! I strongly advise any official Oracle developers reading this post to consider integrating the same functions within the main program GUI.
I'd been struggling with housekeeping a really old virtual machine with a static disk that was constantly filling up, no more!

A full thumbs up from a very happy user, much appreciated.

Sterling effort, keep up the great work

Kindest regards,

KPM

[mpack]

Thanks for the compliments, although the phrase "constantly filling up, no more!" has me concerned. I hope you understand that a disk is full when the amount you have stored in it matches the size you selected at disk creation time, and that this is true regardless of whether the disk created is fixed or dynamic. I.e. a dynamic drive might be smaller than the requested size, but it can never grow larger (not unless you enlarge it with a tool such as CloneVDI). A variable disk capacity is not something which the guest OS would expect, or know how to deal with.

[wmeyer]

I notice that you have not posted a source code zip that is current with your EXE. Just wondered whether that's intentional, or perhaps not so many people have downloaded the source?

[mpack]

Intentional, yes. I had someone who was taking the code, making one trivial change, renaming it, slapping their own authorship label on it and publishing it on Github. I found this irritating. I made the source available for openness sake and to allow people to tailor it for their own needs - not to allow others to take credit for my work.

Previous discussion: https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic ... 90#p342917

Besides which, few people were downloading the source. If you haven't noticed since 2015 that the releases weren't synced up then it presumably isn't a priority for you either.

[wmeyer]

No, it hasn't been a priority at all. I've been thinking about putting together a small app to mechanize some of the VBoxManage tasks that I don't use often enough to remember how, and thought I might look at your code, which I assume is using the SDK.... Anyway, that made me notice the discrepancy.

Sorry to hear people have been unethical with your work, but I cannot say I am surprised. Thanks for your efforts -- CloneVDI is a core tool for me.

[mpack]

I thought I might look at your code, which I assume is using the SDK...

That would be a bad assumption! CloneVDI is a stand alone tool,, written from scratch using my own code for all tasks. It doesn't use any SDK and it doesn't require VirtualBox to be installed. VBoxManage is not used.