Compressing Huge Virtual PC Hard Drives
I have several upcoming demos where I'd like to show off Windows Server 2008. I broke out my MSDN DVDs and installed WS2008 Enterprise and Visual Studio 2008, and the file size quickly ran up to 10GB. This drive is going to serve as the base for other differencing hard drives, so I want to compact it as much as possible while I can.
I haven't done this in awhile and couldn't remember all of the steps. Kurt Shintaku has a great blog post, HOWTO: Compress Virtual PC virtual hard disks (.VHDs). Sweet! One of the steps mentions turning off hibernation to save yourself a Gig with the hiberfil.sys file. I opened up Server 2008... couldn't find a setting to turn it off. Opened up Vista... couldn't find a setting there, either.
Turns out that you can turn off hibernation in Vista and Server 2008 using the following command:
powercfg -h off