Hi, I installed windows 7 ultimate to a (native) VHD (on bare metal). Volume 3 (298GB) contains one file, win7u.vhd (268GB) the OS image. TuneUp Utilities told me the drive was reaching 100% defragmentation, and the system became sluggish. Windows cannot complete the analysis of the drive from the VHD. With TuneUp I completed a 17hour defrag of the VHD. 5gig was left defragmented, so I ran (iobit's) Smart Defrag. A boot time defrag didn't complete, but it did seem to successfully defrag the vhd, more so than tuneup's defrag. Smart defrag says no defrag required (of physical system partition, that VHD resides on, occupying currently 90% capacity) whilst TuneUp still says it's (more than) recommended. Do I need to defrag this disk? Do I need > 15% free space? Can I resize the (native) vhd (ie shift+f10 boot from windows cd to cmd, diskpart, list, sel and attach vol vdisk, shrink, then defrag from command prompt (whilst vhd dismounted) the sys partition? Will defrag.exe run from cmd (recovery console, outside OS)? Can perfect defrag help? Thanks
You must have installed a tremendous number of programs to get to 269GB. My Win7 Ultimate VirtualPC was max 14GB during the tweaking and updating. With Office and the rest of what I wanted it got to slightly over 19GB in the final configuration. General consensus I can find is that defragging within a VirtualPC might actually make the size a bit bigger. I've done it, but didn't note much change in size. What you need to do is precompact/compact the VHD using the VPC wizard ... if using the MS product. Dunno about the others. The web is loaded down with threads about defragging a Virtual PC.
defrag NATIVE vhd (no host like VBOX/VPC/... barebones install) Only ~30gb is application data, if I relocate media - LOTS of media. Increasingly large number of installs, as I'm demoing VSTs and DAWs, and these have some huge resources.[/QUOTE] Sandboxed most installs (where possible), these may be portable, or re-locatable.. The VHD resides on the disk. It loads automatically, the first and only BCD entry. Do I have to install another 'OS' elsewhere, to free up and defrag the physical drive my win7 vhd resides on? Is there not a 'pure' command-line defrag, that can run from the console? I don't use hyperbox or vpc. I have virtualbox but not using it, and that's installed inside the (native) VHD, on bare metal. Think I'm stuck
Can you compact a native VHD? If the size is attributable to data, sounds to me you either need a much larger HDD or you need to offload some of the data. I'd imagine you need space for future growth anyway if you intend to keep the data where it is. Is there any special reason you have to use a virtual drive? Why not just access everything from your normal OS?
You can try defragging the individual VHD file using WinContig. Is this VHD dynamic or fixed ? How much free space do you have inside the VHD ?
Defragging doesn't reduce the size of the occupied space. It essentially realigns fragmented files "end-to-end", i.e. makes them contiguous. If defragging did reduce the used space, you'd be deleting data, not just moving it around. There may be some very small size reduction involved in practical application, but it's not going to be significant.