Compacting under the Virtual Machine Settings does not work on a 12 GB ext3 drive with a ubuntu derivative installed.
Tried to copy it to another 12 GB drive using this from a live CD boot:
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
and the new drive's vmdk was just as large.
Tried Acronis Rescue CD and the same happened.
Why is it so hard? Must I install linux again to a new drive just to recover the unused space?