Error: Shrink hard disk operation is temporarily unavailable!

[kgardas]

Hello, when trying to compact Ubuntu 8.04 image in VirtualBox 2.1.0 running in Solaris Express Developer Edition 1/08 I always get this error message:

karel@silence:/ufs0/vbox$ VBoxManage modifyhd /ufs0/vbox/ubuntu804.vdi compact VirtualBox Command Line Management Interface Version 2.1.0 (C) 2005-2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.

Error: Shrink hard disk operation is temporarily unavailable!

What exactly does it mean? That I shall still keep trying, or that the feature is disabled in 2.1.0 release? I've never tried compacting of Ubuntu disks, but I remember to compact Windows NTFS based disks several times while using VBox 1.6.x.

[wendal]

It appears in the source code that this in an unconditional error message.

273 	#if 1
274 	RTPrintf("Error: Shrink hard disk operation is temporarily unavailable!\n");
275 	return 1;

It will probably re-enabled in a later release.

[Adrian Wilkins]

That said, this is not a helpful error message ; there are more than one issues devoted to it already.

My suggestion is that it would have been better to create a ticket for this right from the start, and have the error message link to it, as well as being worded more clearly.

[pjw1965]

duplicate of #2833