>Does anyone know of a way to compress my larger VHDs that range from 2GB
Quote:
>up to 16GB? I know there's some kind of way (in VPC somewhere) of
>compressing them. If I recall correctly, you first do a defrag inside
>the VM, then there's some external tool which makes the file smaller
>somehow. I could use a refresher on that process, but even after all
>that, I'd still like to zip the final file to get the optimal
>compression. Even an external 500GB drive seems to fill up easily these
>days 
That's something totally different than compression like you're
talking about, it's only to compress out free space to shrink VHD
files, it's not whole file compression.
There's a couple possible answers to your question, the first being to
format your external HD as NTFS and use NTFS compression (not the best
compression, but not bad) but if it's a large partition, you have to
use something other than the base OS to format it because XP wont
format it NTFS.
The second is to get a better "compressed folders" app like the latest
version WinZIP, it's handle bigger files. If it's just for archiving,
this is the way I'd go, but make sure it verifies the archive when you
create it, USB can introduce problems as well.
--
Bob Comer
On Sat, 28 Feb 2009 15:38:30 +0100, d d <go_on_try_and_sp@xxxxxx_me.com>
wrote:
Quote:
>I know you could say this isn't a Virtual PC problem (but please don't).
>
>I'm trying to archive some of my rarely used VHD files to a USB drive
>and I've noticed that VHD files compress quite well (using XP's "send to
>compressed folder"). I've seen the zip files come out between 33% and
>50%, which if you're arching 100GB's worth of VHDs is very nice saving.
>
>Unfortunately, there's a well known and MS-admitted problem with files
>over 2GB that they can become corrupted, so it won't even try and create
>them.
>
>Does anyone know of a way to compress my larger VHDs that range from 2GB
>up to 16GB? I know there's some kind of way (in VPC somewhere) of
>compressing them. If I recall correctly, you first do a defrag inside
>the VM, then there's some external tool which makes the file smaller
>somehow. I could use a refresher on that process, but even after all
>that, I'd still like to zip the final file to get the optimal
>compression. Even an external 500GB drive seems to fill up easily these
>days