Need to downsize Windows 7 guest

[Izabelcka]

Is this possible? My pc says it's running out of space and I want to downsize my Vbox Windows 7 image.

[mpack]

If the disk size is one byte, then you probably can't shrink it.
If the disk size is a zillion petabytes then there's probably some room for shrinkage.
Ah, if only we knew where in that range your disk was, and how much data is stored on it, what type of disk image it was... that sort of thing.

[Izabelcka]

My full drive is 1T.

I put about 450G for my virtual box image, and I am only using about 80G for the vbox so far.

On my host OS, Linux, I have hardly any space though. So I need to downsize the VBox OS.

Where would I find the type of disk image?

[mpack]

Where would I find the type of disk image?

When you created the VM you selected a disk type. E.g. VDI, VMDK etc. Also you were given the choice of fixed vs dynamically allocated. See the user manual for an explanation of the options. You can also view the disk type in File | Virtual Media Manager.

A classic newbie mistake is to allocate a fixed size drive influenced by some vague notion that it gives better performance. Result: either the host or the guest is congested, leading to poor performance.

Probably the safest/easiest way to shrink the drive has two steps.
1. Shrink the main internal partition using GParted (running inside the guest).
2. Compact the disk by cloning it with CloneVDI, running on the host, with the "Compact" option set. CloneVDI is a Windows app, but it runs well under Wine. Accept no substitutes for CloneVDI, nothing else will work for your scenario, your host doesn't have the disk space.

You must do these two steps in that order.

If you use snapshots then you must select the most recent snapshot in CloneVDI (not the base image) - then you must build a new VM around the clone. If you don't use snapshots then the clone VDI can replace the original disk in the VM Storage settings.