How much disk space should i give to Virutalbox?

First of all sorry if this is wrong section for asking this i did not find any section appropriate to it.

OK, I want to run some patch file and crack software and they contain viruses so i do not want to run it in my OS so i am going to install VM and run them there.
I have 160GB hard disk split in 4 drive. do not want to install in C drive where i installed my OS and neither in my 2 more drive where i kept my softwares and other useful material so option is 4th drive where my brother kept his movies,pics,songs etc but it have only 2.50gb of space left from 20gb.

I am not going to run big application just small cracked application. How much Free space will i need to install VirtualBox should i completely format the drive to install it or can only delete some movies to get more free space and install and left my bro other material beside it. (Drive size is 20gb in which only 2.50gb is free i think its not enough for install Virtualbox)

You need to allocate at least 15GB for a VDI in order to install and run Windows 7 OS. It wouldn't affect your Primary Partition(C so if you have some space in C: install it in the My Documents. It'll run just fine.

Edit : Just to clarify some stuffs, you don't have to format/delete a partition in order to install a virtual machine. Virtualbox will create the virtual disk image(VDI) in a folder. It's similar to an ISO file.

To give you an idea, look at this screenshot :

One more thing if you can clear. Can i be sure that viruses would not affect my main OS when i will run infected software in virtual machine?

Once i installed VM and it was really slow i give it 2gb ram. My system has 8gb ram, i5 3570k and asrock z77 extreme4 mobo.

So why it was not running smoothly? Do i need to give it more ram?

ravinder07 said:

One more thing if you can clear. Can i be sure that viruses would not affect my main OS when i will run infected software in virtual machine?

Click to expand...

Yeah, your HOST operating system will be completely safe from the viruses unless you give write permission to the shared folders.

I share some folders on my HOST(current PC) with the Guest(Virtual Machine) to access some big files without the need to download them again on the VM. I set it as read-only so the files can be accessed in the virtual machine, but it won't be able to overwrite the files.

If you're worried about the viruses from the cracked tools, you can simply run it on Sandboxie. It'll take much less space when compared to the Virtual OS.

Your VM was slow because the material is not good for virtualization, some processors are bad at it