WindowsXP on a FAT32 disk - expand?

Discussion in 'Windows Virtual Machine' started by RossSH, Jan 25, 2013.

  1. RossSH

    RossSH Bit poster

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    Okay, so I was short sighted when I setup my VM a year or so ago and made it only a 15 GB virtual disk and formatted it as FAT32. And now I need more space, primarily because my son has many games he wants to download. So, I tried to expand the drive, but the extra space ended up as unallocated which I have learned is because a FAT32 partition cannot be expanded. Bummer. Wish I knew that a year ago.

    I would just start from scratch, but it took several days of windows update h311 to get my installation just up to date, then on top of that I would need to reinstall every thing I have done in the past year. So, I very much would like to avoid that due to not just the time, but also the mental effort to figure out what that all was.

    I thought I had a good solution. I use Norton Ghost and that allows a disk to be duplicated - and make a bootable duplicate. So, I created a new disk that is 128GB and partitioned/formatted it as NTFS. I then used Norton Ghost 14 to copy my existing disk over to this new disk. All seemed to go fine. I then removed my original disk from my PVM and changed the new disk to be at IDE0:0 and at the top of the boot order. But, when I try to start the VM, it finds nothing to boot on that drive. It also seems to not find the Parallel Tools, so I take that as a hint that my new .hdd isn't a complete copy the way I had hoped.

    Anyone gotten something like this to work or have a different idea how to move my Windows installation to a new and larger .hdd?
     
  2. DarrylZ

    DarrylZ Junior Member

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    +1, I ran into this just today as well. All the details on KB article http://kb.parallels.com/en/113972 were for naught when I found my XP virtual image is ALSO formatted as FAT32. What do we do now?
     
  3. Specimen

    Specimen Product Expert

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  4. DarrylZ

    DarrylZ Junior Member

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    It would be nice to have that in the knowledgebase article... I just did the CMD and "convert c: /fs:ntfs" and it's restarting now.
     
  5. RossSH

    RossSH Bit poster

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    Thank you @Specimen, for providing that link. I searched for days back in January for a solution and finally gave up. With that, I was able to pretty quickly get my volume converted. Resizing it in Windows XP took a little longer since most everything on the web gave incorrect advice about using built-in "Expand" command, but XP has none. I finally found a free Partition Assistant from Aomei that does the trick and took just a minute to complete the process.
    Yea! I am now up to 64GB and NTFS, so I can expand further, if needed.
    Free Aomei Partition Assistant Home Edition on CNET
     

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