Compacting a VPC Virtual Hard Disk - Need Utility to Zero Disk First

In the help files for VPC 2004 it makes several mentions
of a disk utility that must be run to see any benefits to
using Virtual Hard Disk Compaction as follows:

o You must run a disk utility program to zero the deleted
data before using the compact option.

o Before compacting the disk, we recommend that you use a
disk utility to zero out blank space, which should result
in a smaller compacted virtual hard disk.

o Before you perform this procedure, we recommend that
you delete unwanted files and then use a third-party disk
utility to zero out the blank spaces.

So now my questions:
Is there a reliable / safe / free utility that does this?

Has anyone every seen a reduction in size of Virtual Disk
(.vhd) file?

Thank in advance for sharing your experience.

Rod

 

See Robert Moir's website for the details on this. You can use Eraser
for zeroing. http://www.robertmoir.co.uk/win/VirtualPC2004FAQ.html

Also, what I prefer to do is make a 2nd disk image, boot from a ghost
DOS boot disk, and just ghost the image to the 2nd disk image. This
is a much faster and easier solution.

Yes, I've seen reductions in disk size.

Steve Jain, Microsoft MVP for Virtual PC for Windows
Website: http://www.essjae.com

 

Steve,

Thanks for your reply. I had found the note on
www.robertmoir.com about Eraser.

Eraser has been running on a 4.8 GB .vhd (16 GB to the
guest OS) for 5 1/2 hours and it still has 1/4 of the way
to go. It's running on a 3 GHz PC giving the VPC window
equal CPU. The latest Eraser doesn't seem to offer a way
to shut off the built-in Erase methods (Gutmann - 35
passes, US DoD 5220.22-M 7 + 3 passess) even though I
only want to changed the unused disk space to the 000.

I would like to hear more about the ghost method and how
I might get the ghost boot disk.

Thanks for your knowledge and experience.

Rod

 

Did you create your own task? You can just specify a new task and add
the 3 byte pattern of zeros. It will only do 3 passes if you use the
task you created, but it will take a really long time, which is why I
prefer the Ghost method.

To get a Ghost boot disk, you'd need to purchase the Symantec Ghost
software (the personal edition will work too) and use their boot disk
maker. Alternately, if you have a boot disk, you can just copy the
DOS EXE to your boot disk, although GHOST.EXE is quite large.

There's not much more to it than I posted earlier. You create a new
disk image, mount it as a 2nd hard drive, boot off a ghost disk or VFD
image, run ghost and dump the image to the new drive. Shut down the
VM, move the new disk image to hard disk 1 in the VM settings and
start it up. If it looks ok, delete

Steve Jain, Microsoft MVP for Virtual PC for Windows
Website: http://www.essjae.com