Tips for compacting virtual hard disks

re: Tips for compacting virtual hard disks

opresterud — Fri, 29 Jul 2005 16:42:59 GMT

That is my experience too, Ghost'ing to another VHD is both faster and better.

And the "old" Ghost before version 9 is also to be prefered in this process, since it really copies file-for-file (and do not preserve the drive's sector layout). The new Ghost is not Ghost but uses the DriveImage technology Symantec got when they bought PowerQuest.

One feature I would like to have is an explorer add-on so you can right-click to create a new VHD, and with a single dialog interface instead to the wizard. Drag'n'drop of VHD files into the settings page would also be nice, so you don't need to browse.

re: Tips for compacting virtual hard disks

mariusz — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 00:24:22 GMT

Hi
I also have some problems with free space with vhd images. Like SvOlli I think the best method is using imaging - its very good!! I have image vhd file 7GB of size! after imaging and restoring the system this file was only 1.2 GB in size.
BR
Mariusz

re: Tips for compacting virtual hard disks

SvOlli — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 19:40:59 GMT

I get the best results using imaging software like Norton Ghost to copy the data to a fresh vhd-file. On QNX 6.3 I just used tar for the transfer after making the hd bootable.

re: Tips for compacting virtual hard disks

SJ — Fri, 08 Jul 2005 22:13:34 GMT

If you use the precompactor first, you should be able to then defrag and compact the disk down.

re: Tips for compacting virtual hard disks

Chris — Fri, 08 Jul 2005 21:31:30 GMT

We had a problem with this a while back. Someone was trying to figure out how to compress the disk and accidentally ran a disk striping tool (overwrites free space on the disk to make it less vulnerable to undeletion or something) and thereafter the VPC disk compression tool would do nothing, and the hard disk file was gigantic. I don't suppose defragmenting the free space would be the solution in this case?