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I have an XP machine, with a 60GB Drive size. In the interests of resilience, I created a clone of this drive, onto a 1TB disk. I want to try avoid using disk2vhd on the origianl disk if possible.

From this cloned disk I created a .VHD file using "Disk2VHD".

I am trying to run this VHD as a VM, (which must be hosted on a local machine), but VM software allows VM's of upto 127GB.

I have attached my VHD in disk management, and am looking for a way I can truncate the disk down to 90GB. (50GB used, 850GB unallocated.) Essentially I want to get rid of the unallocated volume that resides on the disk.

Is there a way / piece of software, that can do this?

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  • So you cloned the XP machines disk to a 1 TB disk (so it had 1 partition of 60 GB and ~840 GB unused) and ran Disk2VHD on that? Now you got a 1 TB VHD you want to shrink to 90 GB?
    – Seth
    Commented Oct 20, 2017 at 10:50
  • Yup, there was very little time for planning the cloning of the machines, lets say, thus 1TB was used across all Pc's hence the disparity.
    – Thom G
    Commented Oct 20, 2017 at 11:04
  • What did you try to resize the VHD so far? After all cmdlets like Resize-VHD should be an easy find?
    – Seth
    Commented Oct 20, 2017 at 11:08
  • @Seth, I haven't been able to fine any resource that allows me to do what I want, the resource you pointed me to can't do what I need: "... but the shrink operation is allowed only on VHDX virtual hard disks."
    – Thom G
    Commented Oct 20, 2017 at 11:36

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Short anwser is you cant. You can however create a backup of all allocated sectors and copy them to a new vdisk. Within Hyperv manager you can select Edit Virtual disk and one of the options is to convert VHD to VHDX. This will do as I described but will be very slow and copy the entire disk.

Once you have a vhdx you can shrink it but only to the last used sector. To get it smaller you also need to shrink the file system.

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  • @Ramhound Because he's trying to shrink a VHD, not a VHDX. "This cmdlet lets you shrink or expand the size of a virtual hard disk, but the shrink operation is allowed only on VHDX virtual hard disks."
    – Skrymsli
    Commented Sep 6, 2019 at 15:27
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    @Skrymsli - It took 2 and half years for somebody to answer my commnet. I missed that particular sentence in the documentation.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Sep 6, 2019 at 20:38

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