Paralels eating HD space, so much Windows cannot launch

Since a couple of weeks Paralels gives suddenly messages that the free HD space left is not sufficient to continue Windows to run.
I started deleting programmes and data from the MAC side. The process continued so now I have nothing left to delete from the MAC side. It is a time bomb now . Since my e-mail system runs on the Windows side (outlook) I expect to stop using my e-mail system when the MAC consumes another bit of my HD space. I had 1.7 GB unused left which was eaten away in a couple of hours.

Does anyone know what goes wrong or what setting I need to change to keep going and one day install MAC programmes again on the MAC side.

One message keeps appearing, the itunes helper (itunes I use on the Windows side) cannot be deleted. Is that the problem??

Greetings from Holland

Arthur van Maurik

since I expect my e-mail system to quite soon, it is on de MAC book windows side, please send a reply also to janevm@accesscable.net.....or answer to this forum my regular e-mail address is: avmc@shaw.ca

 

Have you checked the size of each HDD file? Did they grow much larger than the amount being used by Windows? If they do, you can compact them to save space. Just open the Configuration Editor of each VM, click on each Hard Disk, and click the Compact button on the right.

BTW, snapshots also make the HDD much larger and you will need to merge all snapshots first before you can compact the HDD. Merge snapshot function is in the Parallels Image Tool located inside the Parallels application folder.

Also, a few months ago, I had experienced a runaway log file or temp file on the OS/X side. I was using Tiger at that time. It growed to over 30G and used up all my disk space. I had to manually delete it. I don't remember the name of that file now but you can do a search to see if there is any excessively large log file or temp file.