Huge Virtualbox hard disk image files

MikeHunt79 · 12 Sep 2009 at 21:49

Does anyone know why VB seems to use massive hard disk image files?

Right now, I have a virtual drive image, and it's 20Gb, yet when I boot the system which uses the drive, there is only 4gb on the drive.

Why is this and is there a way to make it smaller?

Daegan · 12 Sep 2009 at 21:54

Did you choose fixed size or dynamically expanding when creating the virtual hard drives?

paradigm · 12 Sep 2009 at 21:55

You say there is 4GB in use on the virtual disk, but what size did you create the disk as?

If its a 20GB disk, it would seem that you allocated all the needed space to the image on creation (simulated by filling the "unused" parts of the image with zeros).

At least this is the case with VMWare, I'm not a VirtualBox user, but I would imagine that it's similar.

MikeHunt79 · 12 Sep 2009 at 22:46

Daegan said:
Did you choose fixed size or dynamically expanding when creating the virtual hard drives?

Hmm, well by the looks of it I've gond for the dynamically expanding option.

I guess it only expands and does not shrink?

paradigm said:
You say there is 4GB in use on the virtual disk, but what size did you create the disk as?

If its a 20GB disk, it would seem that you allocated all the needed space to the image on creation (simulated by filling the "unused" parts of the image with zeros).

At least this is the case with VMWare, I'm not a VirtualBox user, but I would imagine that it's similar.

That sounds like the fixed size image option on VB.

I think I may try creating a new hard drive image, and try to copy everything over... Would this work?

paradigm · 12 Sep 2009 at 23:09

MikeHunt79 said:
I think I may try creating a new hard drive image, and try to copy everything over... Would this work?

Depends on what you would "copy everything over" with, if its an OS drive then you'll want to ghost it from one (virtual) drive to the other.

I did this with success on one of my VM's, I needed a bigger drive, but it was IDE emulation, which VMWare doesn't support expanding, so I created a double sized drive and then booted the VM with ghost 10 and duplicated the drive

Job's a good'un.

MikeHunt79 · 12 Sep 2009 at 23:16

Yep it's an OS drive, not much else but a few programs are set up just the way I want so i'll give it a go with something like Driveimage XML instead of explorer, thanks.

JonJ678 · 13 Sep 2009 at 03:55

It should be contracting as well as expanding, at least I think that's what it does when you pick dynamic. Not really an answer, but it definitely *should* work like you expected it to

MikeHunt79 · 13 Sep 2009 at 04:06

It's definitely not shrinking, In fact I've deleted another 2GB of files from within the image and it's still 20gb.

I'm using v2.1.4 btw, as the newer version just screwed up all my VM's so I had to go back to 2.1.4

marc2003 · 13 Sep 2009 at 11:18

JonJ678 said:
It should be contracting as well as expanding, at least I think that's what it does when you pick dynamic. Not really an answer, but it definitely *should* work like you expected it to

that has never been the case. i really don't know where you got that idea from. :confused: