Compacting a dynamic sized Virtual PC 2004 Hard Disk

Published 08 June 06 11:17 | Simon Phillips

This is really old news, but I’m going to post things that I get asked all the time, mainly so I don’t have to load my email archive.

One of the new features that came in SP1 of Virtual PC is a Virtual Disk Pre-compactor, which is basically a tool that you must run inside the VM before you compact the virtual hard drives.

 In the Virtual Machine

  • Remove all the unwanted stuff from your Virtual Machine (Make sure that the recycle bin is cleared)
  • Defrag the Hard drive.
  • Like the VM Additions package the Pre-compactor is an ISO image that you mount to access the program. This is located (by default) in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Virtual PC\Virtual Machine Additions\Virtual Disk Precompactor.iso. Run the application. This 'zeros' out the unneeded space.
  • exit your VM

In the VM Console

  • Run the Virtual Disk Wizard
  • Choose Edit existing virtual disk
  • Select the virtual disk file

Select compact.

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