#40 Dynamic HDD image size

[Anonymous]

One thing which makes PC virtual machines so great is
the fact that virtual disk size is dynamic (it does not
shrink automatically but at least you do not have to
allocate 100 gig file if you want that big virtual disk)

could this be achieved with pearpc ? (I was even
thinking 'chunkmap' in different file or somewhere in the
disk image which would contain mappings between disk
image positions and real file positions)

Juhani Suhonen
juhani.suhonen@luukku.com

[Sebastian Biallas]

Logged In: YES
user_id=3437

It's not a feature of PearPC but of the underlying file
system. On most modern file systems you get this
automatically, on windows you can use a utility like fsutil
to create sparse files.

[Patrick Naubert]

Logged In: YES
user_id=260442

I am in Linux, and you can do the following:

bash-2.05b# cp --sparse=always pearpc-3gib.img test.img
bash-2.05b# ls -lsk
total 9280044
1940 -rw------- 1 root root 1936 May 22 18:47
Apple3Com3C90x-7-sw.iso
160 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 156 Sep 13 06:55
bootfile.dump
8 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8 May 21 19:53 nvram
3148540 -rw------- 1 root root 3145464 Sep 13 07:02
pearpc-3gib.img
3148540 -rw------- 1 root root 3145464 Sep 10 14:29
pearpc-3gib2.img
4 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3 Sep 10 14:11 ppc.conf
4 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3 Sep 7 10:41 ppc.conf2
0 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Sep 13 06:55 ppc0.active
0 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Sep 10 22:13 ppc1.active
4 drwxrwxrwx 2 root root 4 Sep 10 14:38 scripts
2980828 -rw------- 1 root root 3145464 Sep 14 16:18 test.img
16 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 15 Jun 26 19:11 video.x
bash-2.05b#

Notice that test.img now only takes 2980828 blocks instead
of the original 3148540 blocks. This just saved me 167 megs.
BTW, my guest tell me my guest HD only has 739 megs available.

I can boot and use the test.img file normally with pearpc.

[Nobody/Anonymous]

Logged In: NO

Use NTFS compression for ppc disk image