Why disk space is not released after deleting virtual disk

Question

I installed ubuntu via wubi with the size of 20Gbs. Then i decided to increase it to 65 Gbs using this guide.

Then i decided to delete this virtual disk (65 Gbs) to increase to about 150Gbs. The only thing i didn't follow the guide is that i delete this virtual disk from ubuntu using rm command (The guide seems mentioned to delete it from windows in the last step)

After removing this virtual disk, i see the free disk space remained the same (not increased 65 Gbs as expected).

Anyone know how to fix this, so that i can have 65 Gbs free space back?

Thank you very much

Answer 1

I wouldn't recommend a virtual disk of that size. Wubi installs sometimes get corrupted and you don't want to risk losing 165 GB of data. For the most part, data that size can be stored anywhere e.g. on the /host partition or another NTFS partition. Then if your Wubi install gets corrupted this important data is not lost.

But to get to your main problem. I think there are some issues with large file creation via Ubuntu. I have deleted a virtual disk before and found that Windows' chkdsk will later recover it (and move it to a \found.000 folder) - so whatever is doing the rm is doing something that Windows doesn't quite believe is complete.

What I would recommend in this case is to boot Windows, run a chkdsk /f and then make sure that the file hasn't been recovered. When it's done you should have your space back. Then I would do something other than creating a 165 GB virtual disk. (This is a single file that is larger than most hard disks were only 5 years or so ago).