Andy's VMware vSphere tip#16: Difficult P2V, difficult Shrink! Sometimes old software is best, we had a client today, which had over provision a virtual machine disk, but had made a mistake, and it was using up their datastore, but what ever software they tried "VMware Converter", file level cloning failed, to read a disk sector, which it kept complaining about a disk error, but chkdsk and surface scans stated the disk had now errors, the virtual machine disk refused to defragment, and conventional third party utilities could not shrink the OS partition to complete any of the following tricks in these articles

HOW TO: Shrink or Reduce a VMware Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) using VMware vCenter Converter Standalone v5.5.2

HOW TO: Shrink a VMware Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) in 15 minutes

BUT, old software is often best, years ago (1995), we purchased the General Hardware-Oriented System Transfer software on disk, or often called GHOST!

Add a new disk virtual disk of the correct size, and complete a Disk to Disk CLONE with partition re-size to shrink to 40GB - SIMPLES!

(other third party products available but most failed due to a disk fault!)


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