Shrinking a virtual disk isn’t something that comes up often. Usually you tend to grow your virtual machines. I, however came across the requirement on my home workstation to shrink a Qemu virtual disk running Windows 10 as I wanted to enhance backup/deployment of the OS itself and externalise the games/other software therein. If you’re running a home system with contention for SSD space then you might have a similar issue. Information wasn’t readily available though I did find a very helpful response on Server Fault that gave me the basis for my method. You may want to cross reference that for further information. If you already have an adequate amount of unallocated storage on your disk, skip to step 3. If you do not have storage unallocated to partitions on the virtual disk, you’ll need to shrink your partition/s. In Windows you can do this in Disk Management, even for an online…
Leave a Comment