Huge Virtualbox hard disk image files

[MikeHunt79]

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?

 

[MikeHunt79]

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?

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?

 

[MikeHunt79]

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.

 

[MikeHunt79]

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