You have to play with fsutil.exe file to create the file you want. Sparse file the way you want can be easily done if you master how to use fsutil.exe

See attachment for an example I made ith 30-second playing with fsutil.exe. If you want a tutorial on how to do it, wait after the repeat of Manchester United vs Charlton finished later tonight.


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The tutorial, as an example, to create a file named music.mp3 that takes only 30MB HDD space but is shown by WIndows Explorer as 100MB in size.

1. Open up Command Prompt, and navigate to where you want the file stored. In this example, it will be C:\

2. Then at the command prompt, type:-



A file named music.mp3 with the size of 97.6MB and also takes 97.6MB of HD space will be created at C:\
Play with the 102400000 to get 100MB.



3. Then, type:-



This will mark music.mp3 as a sparse file.

4. Now to reallocate some space taken by music.mp3 as free space so that it will only takes 30MB of space.

Simple calculation shows that 67.6MB of space taken has to be reallocated as free space so that music.mp3 only takes 30MB.

67.6MB = 67600000
30MB = 30000000

Values above are not exactly a correct conversion. Do it yourself.

5. Back to command prompt, type:



This will reallocate a continuous 67.6MB from the start of the music.mp3 file as free space, and now music.mp3 file will only takes around 30MB (well it is actually 33MB - make your own conversion) of HD space. The 0 value above can by anything really, but not exceed 30000000.

Using fsutil to create fake files should works fine.

The fake file created with fsutil.exe will report to be 100MB but only really takes 30MB of HDD space. There are no cheats and the disk and system stability is not compromised. This will only work on NTFS drives though.

Unfortunately, the fake files only works in NTFS partitions. As CD/DVD use either ISO or UDF file system, the fake file will use 100MB of your CD/DVD space.