Comments on: Shrinking VirtualBox VDI Files

By: Jeff

Jeff — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 17:21:51 +0000

Thanks, I really appreciate your information and will be making your site one of my regular visits.

By: Mihai

Mihai — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 21:52:53 +0000

Thanks!!! Worked for me on Linux Mint 8 (32 bit) reiserFS 3.6 and Windows XP on VirtualBox. From 7.5 GB to 4.6 GB.

By: NotALinuxExpert

NotALinuxExpert — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 12:49:19 +0000

Thanks a lot for this hint! Helped me a lot!

By: tripwire

tripwire — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:34:15 +0000

It might be interesting to disable service like sqlserver etc. before starting to defragment you’re hard disk.

By: MikeF

MikeF — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 06:07:56 +0000

Despite the cred of Sysinternals, sdelete appears to be badly broken. I’ve come across numerous postings about it hanging up before completion. Right now, it has hit a brick wall at 33% in my Win2K VM.

Alternatives suggested like Eraser and BleachBit DO NOT set unused file system blocks to zeros – they offer alternative algorithms to overwrite previous data with random bits (as designed).

Any alternatives to sdelete, anyone? Or is there a secret switch to make it complete?

By: Tony

Tony — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:41:55 +0000

Thanks for the useful article. FYI I tried your steps without doing the defrag (VirtualBox 3.0.6) and it shrunk my VDI from 16GB to 8.5GB

By: will

will — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 05:58:45 +0000

Does /home/Keith01/.VirtualBox/VDI/WINXP2.vdi exist? What happens if you do

ls -l /home/Keith01/.VirtualBox/VDI/WINXP2.vdi

By: Keith

Keith — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 03:26:28 +0000

Also, I’m running Ubuntu 9.04 x86 and VirtualBox is 3.04. The guest OS are WinXp…

By: Keith

Keith — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 03:16:54 +0000

Ok, I’m trying the steps above and no matter if i use the clonehd or compact… i get the error:

ERROR: Could not find file for the hard disk ‘/home/Keith01/.VirtualBox/VDI/WINXP2.vdi’ (VERR_FILE_NOT_FOUND)
Details: code VBOX_E_FILE_ERROR (0x80bb0004), component HardDisk, interface IHardDisk, callee nsISupports
Context: “OpenHardDisk(Bstr(szFilenameAbs), AccessMode_ReadWrite, false, Bstr(“”), false, Bstr(“”), srcDisk.asOutParam())” at line 624 of file VBoxManageDisk.cpp

I even went in the folder and still same thing…. i’m confused… any help would be appreciated..thanks

By: will

will — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 17:30:10 +0000

Thanks for the feedback Neo. I’m glad it was helpful.