Vista - Windows XP virtual pc hard drive fails to commit changes

For several weeks I have been unable to commit changes when I close my VPC.
I have been all over the web searching for two days and have not found the
answer to this issue.

Both the VPC and the host are XP SP2. The error suggests a read only
Virtual Hard Drive or no disk space in the physical computer. Indeed, the
drive hosting the VHD has only 340 KB free, the drive being 21.9 GB and the
VHD being just less than that.

However, when I run the VPC and examine the space used, I see three drives,
C, D, E. C and D are NTFS with capacities of 30 and 34 GB--logical drives of
some sort. The C drive shows actual use of 10 GB and the D drive shows 1 GB
used. The E drive is mounted iso, the virtual pc accessories and is only 27
MB.

To me, this shows my VHD should have approximately 10 GB free. Somehow this
logical, if you will, availability inside the VHD does not translate to space
for committing changes saved in the undo disk. It seems my efforts at
freeing space on my VPC drives by removing software have only served to bloat
my undo disk to 17 GB. Shutting down now takes about fifteen minutes, and
the changes still do not commit.

It seems that without committing the changes, compacting the disk or trying
to make another virtual drive will ultimately lose all my changes. What am I
missing? Where can I look to get an understanding of what is happening here?
I intend to keep searching the web and documents for an answer, but if
anyone has decent clue, I will surely appreciate it.

>Both the VPC and the host are XP SP2. The error suggests a read onlyThat's the problem. The easiest thing you can do is to free up space
on the host drive to let the changes be merged in, then you can
compact the drive and move back anything you might have moved off that
drive.
Deleting something in a VM doesn't decrease the VHD's size until you
run the precompactor, then compact the disk, and VPC doesn't reuse the
sectors to do the merge because it's not a trivial task for the merge
routine to know which sectors are used or not, so it can't overwrite
anything.

--
Bob Comer




On Tue, 2 Dec 2008 06:44:01 -0800, John Richter
<JohnRichter@xxxxxx> wrote: