Forum Discussion
Please help me understand how Win11 is screwing this up
This is a picture of the properties of a particular VM I want to back up.
This is a picture of an external HDD I have, which is completely empty (obviously).
This is the error I get when I try to copy the above VM to the above external HDD.
Clearly Win11 is totally screwing up space calculations here.
Any idea how, why, and how to fix it?
3 Replies
Try to backup on the internal drive.
Ensure that Hyper-V is properly enabled and configured.
Check if the VM is in a state that allows backup (e.g., it's turned off or saved, not running).
Not sure what "Hyper-V" is and have no recollection of using it, but I did figure out that the issue was Explorer itself. It struck me as curious that the space available was always the same as what was left on my host's HDD (which is why I am moving the VM off). Paying more attention to the original message, despite dragging (or using Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V) it always indicated some destination on the host's HDD - every time. Either Documents, or Windows, or C:\, depending on which path I navigated to the external HDD from. So, Explorer seemed to be unable to correctly set the chosen destination, and I have no idea why.
My fix: I used PowerShell and did a recursive copy to the external HDD. Worked perfectly but may not be as good a solution as I thought: the VM runs agonizingly slow like this. Ooof!
