Win7 show hdd everytime as full

[michi-bazi]

Hello everybody,

I am a total newbe with Virtualbox.
My problem is as follows: Everything runs great Installation OS and so on.
But when I open the Windows- explorer i see that the virtual hdd is full.
Have tried everything to get free space, no chance!
Here is my system:
2*XEON
48 GB Ram
2 230GB SSD
2 580 GTX
For my Virtual system I have this reserved:
6 CPU
16 GB Ram
128 MB Grafic 2D and 3D activated
20 GB VDI

Would be terrific if someone could tell me what´s wrong. Or what I have configured wrong.
If there is a already a topic please excuse me haven´t found something fitting.

Best regards
Michael

[michi-bazi]

Sorry what I´ve forgot to mention is that the base system is opensuse 11.3 64

[Sasquatch]

You have W7 on a 20 GB VDI, no wonder it's saying it's full. Did you check the hardware requirements for W7? It needs a bigger hard drive, especially if you install a few programs like Office on it. To enlarge the VDI, shut down VB completely and get Mpack's CloneVDI tool from the Windows section and run it through Wine, or use the VBoxManage command if you have VB 4.0. After that, you just need to increase the partition size.

[rayH]

I do not know much about MS Windows, but I do have six 32bit Win7 guests that run concurrently with 9GiB VDIs. However they each have only 768MiB of RAM allocated. If you give your MS guest 16GiB how big is the swap (I cannot remember what MS call it) file? I thought that it had to be at least as big as the RAM with NTFS.

[Sasquatch]

The file system doesn't matter and you can't even install W7 on a FAT32 file system (if the disk is still raw, but it might format it to NTFS either way). The basic setting for Windows is to match the RAM for it's pagefile, or give a bigger value like 1,5x RAM. I usually give it a fixed amount of 1 GB unless I give it plenty of RAM (2+ GB), then I just disable the pagefile.
But, the pagefile is based on the RAM the Guest OS has, not how much the Host has. The Guest can't see that. So even if you say you have a 20 GB VDI, you haven't told us any of the other VM settings.