My "pre-allocated" VMWare image was taking up 120 GB on my drive for about 40GB of data. I found many references on how to shrink these images (.vmdsk), but they were largely obsolete and misleading. It takes a while, and the steps are weird, but it's fully supported by VMWare 3.
At a high level, here are the steps. Alas, I'm short of time so no details.
- Close down the guest OS.
- Using VMWare settings for 'hard drive' you can change the image from pre-allocated to the default. This takes hours but it works.
- Open the guest OS and run XP defrag.
- In the guest OS update VMWare tools.
- In the guest OS Run VMWare tools "shrink". Takes hours.
- In the guest OS Defrag again as a nice-to-do.
- Shut down and restart to make it all nice and clean.
My image now consumes about 45 GB of drive space. It's not pre-allocated, so it will get host OS fragmented as it grows but I can live with that.
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