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Compressing a VirtualBox VDI file for a Windows guest running on a Linux Host

Published on 11th February 2016 Estimated Reading Time: 1 minute

Recently, I had a situation where my the VDI files for my Windows 10 virtual machine expanded in size all of a sudden and I needed to reduce them. My downloading maps for use with RouteBuddy may have been the cause, so I moved the ISO installation files onto the underlying Linux Mint drives. With that space, I then set to uncovering how to compact the virtual disk file, and the Sysinternals sdelete tool was recommended for clearing unused space. After downloading, I set it to work in a PowerShell session running on the guest operating system from its directory using the following command:

.\sdelete -z [drive letter designation; E: is an example]

From the command prompt, the following should do:

sdelete -z [drive letter designation; E: is an example]

Once, that had completed, I shut down the VM and executed a command like the following from a bash terminal session:

VBoxManage modifyhd [file location/file name].vdi --compact

Where there was space to release, VDI files were reduced in size to return more disk space. More could be done, so I will look into the Windows 10 drives to see what else needs to be moved out of them.

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