start a vm in safe mode

Question

I have a VM in Hyper-v that needs to be cleaned there in no more space the VM will not start

Answer 1

I am not sure what your use case is. One might be to limit backup size. Similar to incremental and differential backups.

Other things that might work would be to mount the Windows Server recovery media and see you can access the storage to perform any space cleanup operations.

Answer 2

I suggest you mount the VM drives in disk management or another VM. You can then clear some space and restart the original VM.

Answer 3

Thank you for the comment, appreciated.

The disks are 'differencing disks' and that option I cannot see. Any ideas?

Answer 4

Merge the differencing disks into the parent. This way you are working with a singular update image. You can then either try to clear space or extend the VM and partitions, if needed.

Answer 5

Merge? The way to do that would be to ... delete the checkpoint?

There is one check point that I can see it is about 800GB.

The deletion of the checkpoint is the only way I think this can be done. As I read more on this once the checkpoint is deleted a merge will commence.

Why would one configure 'differencing' when configuring a finite number of VM's... less than 15 in this environment.