CCleaner in VirtualBox Windows 7 virtual machine

[JMA92410]

This is a report of events which seem to indicate that there might be a problem running CCleaner on VirtualBox fixed size virtual disks.

I have two Windows 7 virtual machines running in Virtual Box on a Kubuntu host.

On one of my Win7 machines (lets call it A), I have had problems when starting the virtual machine, it was checking the disk and reporting a lot of errors. I had this repeatedly until I noticed it only happened when I had run CCleaner before closing down the machine (which I  usually do). On the other win7 virtual machine (lets call it , I was also running CCleaner but I had no problem. One day I could not start the A virtual machine any more and had to restore a previous version of the virtual machine disk and I completely stopped using CCleaner !

The two machines are based on the same OS (Win 7 home premium), I have installed different software, this might be the cause. Another potential cause which seems to me more likely is that the B virtual machine is built on a "dynamically allocated storage" disk whereas the A virtual machine is built on a "fixed size" disk.

Recently I needed to enlarge the disk of my B virtual machine, and I cloned the disk to a dynamic size storage like the A machine. And now, I have run CCleaner a number of times and things seem to be OK (only the first time I ran CCleaner after the operation, CCleaner ended up crashing but after that everything has been clear).

Cheers

Jean-Marie

 

Technical details : Kubuntu 13.10 / VirtualBox 4.3.6 / Virtual disks for A and B virtual machines are .vdi files under SATA controller