VHD compacting error–limitation in file system

I had used the sysinternal tool (disk2vhd) to create a VHD image of one my desktop machines that I wanted to virtualise.

I got this VM up and running in Hyper-V, and after removing a number of programs and files, I wanted to compact the VHD file. So using Hyper-V to manage the disk, I went to compact the disk. When I got this error

I have truncated the error message

System failed to compact ‘……….vhd’ ….. due to a file system limitation.

Anyway after a quick web search I discovered this was probably due to snapshots in the VHD. So I run up the VM and ran the following command.

vssadmin delete shadows /all

It must also be noted that I think vssadmin is being replaced with diskshadow (edit: diskshadow is only available currently on windows 2008 server) so I think you can do the same thing with that program.

diskshadow

DISKSHADOW> delete shadows all

References:

http://www.expta.com/2010/06/unable-to-compact-vhd-due-to-file.html

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc772172%28WS.10%29.aspx

http://angrytechnician.wordpress.com/2011/02/23/vssadmin-is-dead-long-live-diskshadow/

VHD compacting error–limitation in file system