Man can .vhd or Virtual Hard Drive files get big! At my day job we use a lot of Virtual Machines that run on Virtual PC. This is mainly my doing. The rest of the company mainly uses vmware, but I start with Virtual PC years ago at Business Integration Group and it just stuck.

Anyway this is the process I follow to shrink my virtual PCs.

  1. Disk Cleanup
  2. Delete Uninstall files – all those $ files in C:\windows
  3. Defrag – at least two times
  4. Run the precompactor tool from MS
  5. Close the virtual pc by properly shutting down
  6. Run the management console for virtual PC and edit a disk then choose to compact it

This has worked well for me. I usually get my images down a few gigs using this method. I do not mount the vhd in another virtual pc as a slave drive anymore either. Also I work with Windows 2003 Server the most at the moment, so I do not worry about hibernation files and the like.

Finally I usually 7zip to Ultra compress the vhd. This usually gets them below 8 gigs or so and I am all set.

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