VM but not XP mode

there has to be a way of stating only the partition that I want to use as a VHD, there has to be. I cant be the only one out there that is having this issue. A lot of computers' hard drives are over that limit!

Maybe Microsoft has an answer, when im feeling better (i have a stomache issue), ill check their website and see.

I just want to thank you, Kari, for helping me, and sticking with this issue. I really appreciate it (you reformed n00b-hugger.... lol - and im a n00b with this Windows 7 VM), you have been great.

thanks also to the others... appreciated too!

jason, "DeVoiD"

AWESOME. it worked. thanks so much Kari for all of your help I really appreciate it. While VirtualBox does crash about 1 in 4 times when either launching or tryign to shut down the machine, at least it workls and has all of my software running as it did on my old laptop (which im using at the moment).

Now all I have left, is to clean off my desk, grab the new docking station, and get this thing set up permanently.

I guess I will keep the old latop as a standby for the next few months just in case I have other issues. Of course my main fall back if everything goes south, is to frag the new laptop, install XP and go from there (which would be a shame as it has 4Gb Ram and XP32bit wont take advantage of that, plus the directx 10 of course).

so, thanks again. I will try to be a regular on this website and forum.

I wonder if Microsoft will address the issue of the partition size limitation of their VM? lets face it, large and very large hard drives have been out there a very long time, and it seems foolish for them not to address it, even if it is a setting that they have, that when you go to create your VM, and attach the VHD, it resizes the drive to what they require.... wouldnt that be nice? and an OBVIOUS need!

I realize this is an older post but wanted to mention my success making a similar effort.

I have a HTPC I built and installed Vista Ultimate x64 a couple of years ago where I had installed Microsoft Virtual PC and created an XP SP3 vm. The hard drive default for the XP guest was 64GB. My Vista host has a pair of mirrored 160GB drives.

I ran low on space a few days ago and finally noticed my 64GB XP vm hard drive was only using between 7G and 8G of the 64GB so I started researching how to re-size the VM hard drive to something smaller and ran across this thread among others.

I am now running a 16GB vm hard drive. Here is what worked for me:

1. On my Vista host OS, I manually cleaned up a bunch of temp files, uninstalled several years of Turbo Tax programs, removed or deleted misc other stuff I no longer wanted and ran disk cleanup.

2. On the XP vm, I followed the same cleanup steps above to get the used space as small as I could. I then ran chkdsk, defragged, and then ran the precompactor.

3. On the Vista host, I ran the Virtual Disk Wizard to try to compact my *.vhd file. I only had about 21GB of free space on my host at this point so the wizard would not run because there wasn't enough free space to complete the compaction of the 64GB *.vhd file.

4. I downloaded and installed the free EASEUS Partition Manager 6.0.1 Home Edition on my XP VM and set the partition size to 15GB, rebooted the VM and EPM succeeded in shrinking the VM's active partition with no errors. I did take several hours, however.

5. I started the XP vm back up and confirmed with disk manager that the active partition was now approximately 15GB with 48GB of unallocated disk space.

6. On the XP VM I again defragged and ran the precompactor just to be on the safe side and then shutdown the XP vm.

7. I tried the Virtual Disk Wizard compact again but it still would not run because there wasn't enough free space on the host.

8. I downloaded and installed vmToolKit's vhd Resizer and ran it against the 64GB *.vhd and told it to create a new *.vhd. The GUI for vhd Resizer displayed 15GB as the minimum size but I had to bump it to 16GB to get the resize button to change from disabled to enabled.

9. vhd Resizer completed successfully so I created a new VM configuration using the new 16GB *.vhd. In creating the new VM, I selected 'other' for OS type instead of Windows XP because the hard drive setting defaulted to 64GB. By choosing 'other' I could set the hard drive size to 16GB.

10. I started up the VM and confirmed all of my installed software and files were still present and working so I deleted the 64GB original *.vhd and am now back to approx 75GB free on my Vista host.

Hopefully this may help others.

-Eric