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Hyper-v Windows 2008 r2 ; deleted snapshot tree now disk full

I deleted the snapshots-subtree and after power off all my diskspace has been eaten up. I did this for 2 virtual servers, but I cannote reclaim space, so cannot start the virtual machines anymore.

Any ideas ? I already tried to export and import the virtual machine to another drive without luck.
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Ivan
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Hi there,

if I'm not mistaking deleting snapshot causes them to be merged to early created snapshot, so by doing that you have increased space used.

Maybe you can shrink it size. If there is a lot of free space on those disks (looking from within OS), then from disk management select disk (lets say drive D), right click and use shrink disk, and after that turn off VM. Go to properties of VM, select disk, go to Edit and use Shrink option. That will reduce it size for amount of space you shrink it via disk management.

Note: Do have a backup of them, such as that export you made.

Regards,
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Hi Spriggan13. I have a backup of the latest state of the virtuals. Problem is that the first virtual server is still in the "merge in progress 10%" state, the second is in "exporting 14%" state.

Both the servers are turned off at the moment. I was already shrinking another drive with 1 TB left, but it is so slow. After half an hour I still see querying volume for available shrink space
Hi,

well..I would cancel that export of VM (click on VM and there is cancel option), and then wait for merge to finish.
When you cancel export, you can turn off that VM, and simple copy/paste that vhd to another drive, so that merge operation could finish, if there is no more space for it to complete. After that is done, try with shrink.

If you move vhd by copy and delete, you can later get it back to the same location and turn on that VM again.

If they are very large drives, then it will take a lot of time, yes.

Not sure what else to do..
Spriggan13; both machines are already turned off. I can't cancel because it goes on where it left off.
You will need another box with available storage preferably high performance: TechNet: Manually Merge .AVHD to .VHD.

Follow the process by copying off the parent and then one each of the children to merge them in. Once done, copy the parent back to the host after deleting the .AVHD files.

Option: You could keep a copy of the originals just in case. And, you could mount the newly merged VHD files in a test VM on another Hyper-V host, even Windows 8, to verify it boots safely. Then copy over top the parent on the original host.
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