Re: This Is Why They Say Windows Is A Great OS -- If Your Time Is Worth Nothing

On Fri, 1/3/2025 3:24 PM, rbowman wrote:

On Fri, 3 Jan 2025 07:16:32 -0500, Paul wrote:
 

My Linux container "ext4.vhdx" is currently 8GB in size.

 
I haven't fired up a WSL instance in a while but iirc the reported size
seemed to be much larger than what was being used. It worked so I never
dug into it.
 

From my notes file, and specific for perhaps, a WSL2 install.

optimize-vhd -Path .\ext4.vhdx -Mode full

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/disk-space

*******

A number of environments have toolage for this sort of thing.
The most impressive one, was some flavor of VMWare, which
zeros out unused container bits (in the logical sense rather
than the physical sense), then it "compacts" the container as normal.

The more crude procedures, the user is responsible for using
"zerofree" on unmounted partition, or "sdelete64.exe -z" on a drive
letter first, and the compaction tool rebuilds the container,
removing all the zero portions of the partition as it goes.

# Compacting a VHD used under VirtualBox, when VboxManage
# has no support for VHD compaction...
# Zero the white space inside the partition(s) inside the WIN10.vhd first.

diskpart
select vdisk FILE=F:\WIN10.vhd
compact vdisk

*******

   Paul