"System limitation" when starting windows containers on docker for Windows

Question

I was having some trouble with Windows Container, every single image that I pulled was giving me a strange Hyper-V erro:

"The requested operation could not be completed due to a virtual disk system limitation. Virtual hard disk files must be uncompressed and unencrypted and must not be sparse."

All the results from my research pointed out the need to uncheck the "Compress disk to save space" on the disk where the images were being saved, but as you can see that was not my case:

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Answer 1

To be honest, disabling compress on a drive takes a lot of our precious time and patience. This issue thread comment fixed my issue. Just go to %localappdata%\Packages\ and find something like CanonicalGroupLimited.UbuntuonWindows_79rhkp1fndgsc and disabled compression for the folder and all the subfolders

src: github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4103

PS: Installed distro :- Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

Answer 2

The solution from Raymond provided me some insight on the issue. In my case I had to apply the solution to the Hyper-V VM configuration files that Docker is using under Windows. I unchecked the flag "Compress contents to save disk space" under the advanced properties -> Compress or Encrypt attributes, for the folders under C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Hyper-V.

The path where this VM files are stored can vary. So I recommend within Hyper-V Settings to check the location where the Virtual Machines are stored.

Answer 3

After some digging, the solution was quite simple:

On C:/ProgramData/Docker and C:/ProgramData/DockerDesktop folders I saw that the compress flag was active on these individual folders for some reason, after disabling it everything worked like charm.