Compacting VMWare Virtual Drives

After investigating the amazing MicroXP I was interested in compacting the VMWare Virtual drive.

However after defragging and compacting using the VMWare tools for this I found that the drives were taking up more space than the guest operating system.

After looking into this a little further it seems that when the guest os deletes a file from the drive the VMWare drives don't clear deleted files from the drive, probably as an optimisation.

So i grabbed the flexible ccleaner and used its drive wipe function. This zeros free space on the drive which nulls the space on the VMWare drive.

Then rerunning the drive defrag and compact process produces a much more representative drive size that closely matches the size of the guest os.

And the result, a compressed VMWare image of the MicroXP that weighs in at 170mb. Fantastic and perfectly DropBox friendly. As a bonus, once defragged the os boots amazingly fast.

Thanks go to this chap for his write up of MicroXP.