How to reduce the size of a Win XP guest's par tition?

[Cajita]

Recently converted a machine into Virtualbox.
Unfortunately the disk was 80GB but with only about 5 used.
The problem is my VDI is about 10GB (kinda useless since the data is 5GB only)

What is the easiest way to shrink the partition inside the VDI?

[MarkCranness]

You have two choices:
1) Periodic compact: (optional) Defrag, Zero free space, VBoxManage modifyhd ... --compact. (Do these steps in the VM:)

• Backup!
• (Optional, can help with defragmentation) Delete the USN Journal:
  (May interfere with badly written search or archive programs.)

  Code: Select all

  fsutil usn deletejournal /n c:

  http://www.mydefrag.com/VolumeActions-D ... urnal.html
• (Optional) Compact/Defrag the disk, to push all free space to the end.
• Clear all free space to zero (this helps greatly with VB compaction of standard=Dynamically sized VDIs).

  Code: Select all

  sdelete -c c:

  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysi ... 97443.aspx
• Compact

  Code: Select all

  VBoxManage modifyhd <VDIname> --compact

2) Repartition, followed by periodic compact as above

• Backup!
• (Optional, can help with defragmentation) Delete the USN Journal:

  Code: Select all

  fsutil usn deletejournal /n c:

• (Optional) Compact/Defrag the disk, to push all free space to the end.
• Clear all free space to zero (this helps greatly with VB compaction of standard=Dynamically sized VDIs).

  Code: Select all

  sdelete -c c:

• Use EASUS Partition Manager to resize the partition.
  http://www.partition-tool.com/easeus-pa ... tition.htm
  (You probably won't be able to repartition the currently booted partition, so either attach the hard disk to a VM as a non-boot disk and run partition manager from there, or use a UBCD4Win ISO (http://www.ubcd4win.com/), which includes EASUS Partition Manager as part of its download.)
• Boot the VM, and let it do an AutoChk/ChkDsk (it it does not, then manually CHKDSK /f the drive).

[Etepetete]

Hey Mark, you've helped me often in the past, of which I'm grateful. I believe your code is incorrect. With sdelete switches are preceded with a dash and not a slash i.e. sdelete -z C:

Another thing, -z is for cleansing and empty space is overwritten with random data, not zeros (As I understand the information published on the SysInternals Website). The correct command would be sdelete -c C:. One more thing, to run sdelete within the VM, the previous command didn't work for me, only sdelete -c works.

Best regards,

[MarkCranness]

I believe your code is incorrect.

Thank you for correcting me!

After some investigation, I have found the following:

• -z writes random data (3 times) to clean a disk, as you say (I have corrected my post above).
• -c writes zero data (1 times) to zero a disk, very useful for compressing a disk.
• sdelete accepts either /x style options or -x style options.
• The sdelete doc says "sdelete [-p passes] [-z|-c] [drive letter]", BUT the ':' character after the drive letter is required.

... -Z Cleaning and -C Zeroing (swapped) I thought must have been a documentation mistake!