Shrinking VDI file with NTFS partition

[wsun013]

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

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vditool SHRINK ntfs.vdi

but it didn't seem shrinking at all.

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

any idea ?

[achimha]

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

[wsun013]

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

[klaus]

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.

[wsun013]

Thank you all.

I have tried SDelete from

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http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Security/SDelete.mspx

Extract it, run it within the guest OS with -c instead of -z:

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sdelete -c c:

and shutdown the guest OS and virtualbox
then

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vditool SHRINK ntfs.vdi

and it works.

Thanks again.

[mustali]

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/