VirtualBox disks can get out of shape if you expand and reduce them and/or they can get slower over time. Compacting a virtual disk can help, here are the steps:
- Inside the VM Guest run the defrag utility or 3rd party defragger if you have one.
- Empty the free space to zeros with sysinternals sdelete utility. See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/sysinternals/bb897443 From an elevated command prompt run:
sdelete -c -z c:
Now shutdown the VM Guest
- On the host computer, run the “VboxManage modifyhd” command to compact the disk. For example if your disk image is located in /home/keith/VMGuests/win8.1/win8.1hd.vdi run this:
$ VBoxManage modifyhd /home/keith/VMGuests/win8.1/win8.1hd.vdi --compact
Reference:
https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch08.html#vboxmanage-modifyvdi
https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=62334