Vista Tutorial - Reduce hard drive in a VPC

I'm not talking about shrinking the size of the VHD file, I know how to do
that. What I want to know is if there is a way to reduce the size of the hard
drive created inside a VPC. I'm running XP Pro in a VPC and I have a lot of
extra hard drive space. I want to reduce the size of the HD from a 60 GB hard
drive to a 30GB HD. I'm sure once that's done I could shrink the VHD but
right now the VHD is shrunk as much as it will shrink using the established
methods.
This would be like shrinking the size of a HD on a physical machine. Is
there any way to do it without just starting over and creating a new VHD with
a smaller HD size and reinstalling XP and apps into it all over again?

"JonathanL" <JonathanL@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:2D70A111-FCF5-41D7-AF5D-F1E95596A2A2@xxxxxxI can't work out what you are tying to say. There is no disk drive
associated with a vm except the .vhd file. As far as the vm is concerned,
this is its system disk.

How would you shrink the size of the physical HD on a physical machine
(as you suggest)? You can change the partition size, but the capacity of a
physical disk is fixed.

On Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:35:01 -0800, JonathanL
<JonathanL@xxxxxx> wrote:
You could use something like Partition Magic to create 2 30GB
partitions, then don't use the 2nd partition, you've effectively
"shrunk" the disk to 30GB and the VM won't use more than that.

--
Cheers,
Steve Jain, Virtual Machine MVP
http://vpc.essjae.com/

JonathanL wrote:Hi Jonathan,

As far as I know, the only way to do it is to create the
'smaller' VHD, then use an application like Ghost to do a
image copy from the original VHD to the new VHD.

Sincerely,
C.Joseph Drayton, Ph.D. AS&T

CSD Computer Services

Web site: http://csdcs.site90.net/
E-mail: cjoseph@xxxxxx

I looks like that's what I'm going to need to do. I probably don't understand
VM technology as well as I need to. When I created the new VM and installed
XP, I told it to partition and create a HD of 60GB. Now I see this was way
too big and not needed.

If I created another VM, installed XP, and during the install told it to
partition or create a HD of 30GB, would the resulting VHD file be any smaller
than the one I have with the 60GB HD? Or does that not make any difference,
and the only thing that actually affects the size of the VHD file is all of
the apps and data that you install in the guest OS of the VHD?

Jonathan

"C.Joseph Drayton" wrote:

On Thu, 20 Nov 2008 11:37:03 -0800, JonathanL
<JonathanL@xxxxxx> wrote:
did you read my initial response regarding Partition Magic?
Depends, if you use the default VHD, it's dynamically expanding,so no,
a 30GB or 60GB will be of the same initial size. A dynamically
expanding drive only expands as necessary.
The 30GB and 60GB will expand similarly, the difference will be if you
keep adding/modifying files, the 30GB will cap out at 30GB, the 60GB
will continue to expand to 60GB.
However, if you create fixed size disks, then they will take the full
amount of space immediately.

--
Cheers,
Steve Jain, Virtual Machine MVP
http://vpc.essjae.com/

On Thu, 20 Nov 2008 11:37:03 -0800, JonathanL
<JonathanL@xxxxxx> wrote:Wrong conclusion! See below.
If you used the defaults when you created the virtual machine you
would have gotten a "dynamically expanding" type of VHD for your disk
data. What this means is that it is internally configured for 60 Gb
*max* storage of guest data, but the VHD file itself is initially very
small.
When you install the operating system in the guest the VHD file
expands in size to accommodate the extra data to store.
As you then work on your guest machine and add yet more data and
applications the VHD file expands on the host file system.
But all the time when you check the drive from within the guest it
will be reportted as a 60 Gb hard disk, which is only utilized at a
low percentage.

As you may now understand there is absolutely no reason to do what you
are asking here. It will not benefit you at all!
If you make a dynamically expanding drive of 30 Gb the VHD file will
initially be exactly the same size as a 60Gb VHD would be. After you
have installed the operating system they will still be the same size.
The only difference is that once you approach 30 Gb of data the
smaller VHD will max out and you *must* migrate to a bigger drive,
whereas the 60Gb drive is only half full. But in both cases the VHD
file on the host is the same size....

--

Bo Berglund (Sweden)

Thank you one and all. Now I think I understand it. I was hoping that I could
somehow shrink the VHD file more than what I have using the steps outlined
elsewhere, but I can see what I have is as good as it gets. The C: drive in
the XP guest says it's using 10.7GB and the VHD file is 11.9GB after
shrinking (it was 16GB). In order to reduce the VHD file more, I'd have to
delete apps and/or data and then go through the shrink process again. I just
thought I was missing something trick, but I'm not. Thanks again!

Jonathan

"Bo Berglund" wrote:

On Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:30:08 -0800, JonathanL
<JonathanL@xxxxxx> wrote:
You might be able to reduce the size of the VHD on your physical hard
disk by using NTFS compression. This usually results in a 40 to 60%
compression...essentially halving the disk space used.

--
Cheers,
Steve Jain, Virtual Machine MVP
http://vpc.essjae.com/

That did help. The vhd file is now 8.7GB compared to 11.9GB.

Jonathan

"Steve Jain [MVP]" wrote: