Disappearing Disk Space

[claytonblackburn]

When my Windows XP virtual machine started this afternoon I noticed that virtually (no pun intended ) all disk space was gone. Since only a few applications and documents are on the guest operating system, I'm bewildered as to what is using the original 10 GB. I use the virtual box about once a month. I can account for about 8 GB of files so it's possible that nothing is actually wrong except my accepting the default settings when first setting up the VM.

[Perryg]

Are you using snapshots?
These silently take up a lot of space as well and hibernate.

[dmcgraw]

I am not sure, but I think the OP is talking about disk space in the guest, not the host.

If you setup the guest for a max size of 10GB and you can account for about 8GB being used, it doesn't sound like too much space is missing. Did you account for hidden files like pagefile.sys?

[claytonblackburn]

Thanks both of you for such a fast response. Right, the problem is on the guest, not the host. The real problem is that I wasn't paying attention to disk space available on the guest until the little Windows XP space warning message popped up. It's possible, since I rarely need to use the guest operating system, that it's been "running on fumes" for a long time, but the addition of one tiny file last time triggered the warning this time. Dmcgraw's idea that I didn't notice the pagefile.sys file located in the root directory is correct. It's at 288 MB which sounds right but does account for more space. I suppose that there is little that I can safely do at this point to increase the size of the guest "partition".

[Perryg]

There are other hidden system files as well. You can turn off system restore which is going to make it to where you can not restore to a previous date but release MBs of disk space. Plus you can also make sure that you do not hibernate the guest. That creates a huge amount of disk space usage. You can also run a disk clean up and get rid of a lot that could be taking up the space. Then defrag the drive to get the little ducks in order.

[claytonblackburn]

Thanks so much for the advice. I followed these instructions and now have 0.99 GB free.