> There's no easy way to do it. About the easiest would be to make a new
> drive image, ghost the old image and then restore it to the new one.
> Why do you want less capacity? Is the drive already too big (in which
> case, search this newsgroup for "eraser" or "precompactor"), or are you
> afraid of it getting too big?
>
>

>I want less capacity because the disk image expands eventually up to 15GB,
>which is much too much room. My laptop's HDD is only 60GB. I really only
>need 8 or 10GB capacity for VPC, but I didn't know that when I first
>installed it, so I picked 15GB as a guess.
>I have already precompacted and reclaimed zeroed space, but that's a pain to
>do every few months. Maybe I should convert it to a fixed-size image of 10GB
>and leave it at that. I was hoping I could create a new dynamic image of
>about 9GB and transfer the contents of the old image to the new one.

> On Tue, 1 Nov 2005 13:49:07 -0800, "Nick"
> <(email address - cut out)> wrote:
>
> >I want less capacity because the disk image expands eventually up to 15GB,
> >which is much too much room. My laptop's HDD is only 60GB. I really only
> >need 8 or 10GB capacity for VPC, but I didn't know that when I first
> >installed it, so I picked 15GB as a guess.
> >I have already precompacted and reclaimed zeroed space, but that's a pain to
> >do every few months. Maybe I should convert it to a fixed-size image of 10GB
> >and leave it at that. I was hoping I could create a new dynamic image of
> >about 9GB and transfer the contents of the old image to the new one.
>
> If you convert to a fixed size, it will convert to the maximum size
> specified when it was created. Once you create a disk, you can't
> change it.
>
> You have 2 other options, create a new VM and reinstall using a
> smaller VHD, or use an imaging program to move the data from the 15GB
> disk to a smaller one.
>
> --
> Cheers,
> Steve Jain, Virtual Machine MVP
> http://www.essjae.com/vpc/vpc.htm
> "This posting is provided "AS IS" with
> no warranties, and confers no rights.
> You assume all risk for your use.
> I am not am employee of Microsoft."
>

> There's no easy way to do it. About the easiest would be to make a new
> drive image, ghost the old image and then restore it to the new one.
> Why do you want less capacity? Is the drive already too big (in which
> case, search this newsgroup for "eraser" or "precompactor"), or are you
> afraid of it getting too big?
>

>The last thing you typed is what I would like help with. "use an imaging
>program to move the data from the 15GB disk to a smaller one."
>
>How can that be done?
>

>I don't want to naysay, but if a disk is optimized where all the used
>blocks are contiguous at the beginning of the disk why can't diskpart or
>partition magic shrink the NTFS volume capacity?
>
>This change should keep the disk from dynamically growing beyond the
>shrunken volume size.

> On Tue, 01 Nov 2005 19:43:21 -0600, Richard Cardona
> <(email address - cut out)> wrote:
>
>
>>I don't want to naysay, but if a disk is optimized where all the used
>>blocks are contiguous at the beginning of the disk why can't diskpart or
>>partition magic shrink the NTFS volume capacity?
>>
>>This change should keep the disk from dynamically growing beyond the
>>shrunken volume size.
>
>
> Possibly, but have you tried it?

> If this is a VM that shipped with Virtual PC, it's FAT32, not NTFS,
> though I doubt that makes much of a difference.
>
> I've no experience with what happens if you attempt to partition a disk
> image with a second logical partition, as I've never tried it.

>AFAIK, there is no way that you can define a logical partition with
>"dynamic" growth options within a dynamically growing virtual machine.
>Logical partitions have to be a fixed size.You would need to convert to
>a fixed size disk and then it may be possible to create logical
>partitions.

>On 2 Nov 2005 14:41:43 -0800, "Paul Power" <(email address - cut out)>
>wrote:
>
>>AFAIK, there is no way that you can define a logical partition with
>>"dynamic" growth options within a dynamically growing virtual machine.
>>Logical partitions have to be a fixed size.You would need to convert to
>>a fixed size disk and then it may be possible to create logical
>>partitions.
>
>I think was RC was saying is that you may be able to use Partition
>Magic or similar to simply resize the C: drive partition and make it
>smaller, thus only allowing the VM to have say 6GB of drive space
>available on C: instead of 15GB. Then, theoretically, the logical
>partion size would limit the growth of the drive, not the actual VHD
>maximum.

> I think was RC was saying is that you may be able to use Partition
> Magic or similar to simply resize the C: drive partition and make it
> smaller, thus only allowing the VM to have say 6GB of drive space
> available on C: instead of 15GB. Then, theoretically, the logical
> partion size would limit the growth of the drive, not the actual VHD
> maximum.

> Well, I just did a quick test, and resized a 16GB Windows 2000 disk to
> 2.5GB with Partition Magic 7, under VPC2004 and it seems like this
> works too. I was unable to get the drive image to grow past its 2.5GB
> logical limit. Windows would report a disk full error, and deleting
> files and recopying new files did not expand the drive beyond its
> limit.
>
> Please note, that this is under VPC for Windows, but the behavior of a
> VM should be similar under VPC-Mac. Of course, YMMV and I don't have
> the time to mess around with this on my old Mac.

>
> You'd need an imaging program like Ghost, then add a 2nd VHD to your
> VM, boot off a Ghost floppy, and transfer the image from the 1st to
> the 2nd.