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  • First published by (eMicrosoft Community Contributor, Microsoft Partne)
  • When: 8 Mar 2012 7:28 PM
  • Last revision by (aMicrosof)
  • When: 9 Mar 2012 1:38 PM
  • Revisions: 4
  • Comments: 6
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Wiki  >  TechNet Articles  >  How to Compact a Dynamic VHD with Diskpart

How to Compact a Dynamic VHD with Diskpart

How to Compact a Dynamic VHD with Diskpart

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Compacting a expandable/dynamic VHD was a mystery for me until I found those easy steps. You don't need any Hyper-V roles to make those steps. Some other products use the VHD standard, so that only show me how good is implanted the VHD standard when built-in tool easilly manage the format. (need-work tag added, if someone got some en-US screenshot to change mine)


What to do

 

Open a command prompt

diskpart

 


select vdisk file="d:\store\vdisk.vhd"

 

 

 

attach vdisk readonly
 
compact vdisk
 
detach vdisk


exit


Result


Before: (8.2GIG)



After: (7.3GIG)



Optional step


Run sdelete tool from Microsoft in the VM before compacting the VHD. (sdelete -c)

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  • 9 Mar 2012 1:38 PM

    Ed Price - MSFT edited Revision 2. Comment: Title casing and tag. Great article!

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  • Posted by
    on 9 Mar 2012 1:38 PM

    Ed Price - MSFT edited Revision 2. Comment: Title casing and tag. Great article!

  • Posted by
    on 13 Jun 2012 9:32 AM

    Thanks for this concise article, and the tip on using sdelete to clean free space in the VHD.

    If you look at the sdelete syntax technet.microsoft.com/.../bb897443 (under "Using SDelete"), you'll notice that the -V switch is specific for cleaning VHD files.z

    So you would run 'sdelete.exe -z V:' [where V: is the drive letter of the mounted VHD file] and then repeat the steps above to compact the VHD.

  • Posted by
    on 13 Jun 2012 10:40 AM

    Cool !!!

  • Posted by
    on 3 Dec 2012 10:14 AM

    So using sdelete made my .VHD file grow from 85GB to 120GB.  Diskpart compact completed successfully but did not result in a smaller file.  Following these steps expanded my VHD and made my problem worse.  I now have a completely full host drive...

  • Posted by
    on 3 Dec 2012 6:37 PM

    Shan, sorry to hear that. Actually when I did try the sdelete pass, the file grow at first, because it fill empty space with 0 (thus the file grow to it maximum's possible's size), but another compact did the job on my side to simply shrink it.

  • Posted by
    on 3 Dec 2012 6:38 PM

    Shan, sorry to hear that. Actually when I did try the sdelete pass, the file grow at first, because it fill empty space with 0 (thus the file grow to it maximum's possible's size), but another compact did the job on my side to simply shrink it.

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