Decrease size of VM on Hard Drive

I recently increased the size of my Parallels VM on my macbook. I followed the instructions I found on the Parallels site and had no problem doing this. What I did however, was increase it to a larger size than I will ever need. I now want to "reverse" part of the process and reduce the size of the VM on my macbook.

I cannot find any easy instructions that show how to do this. I was hoping it was just as easy as increasing the size by running Parallels Image Tool after I reduce the size of the Windows partition in Windows by using the Disk Management Utility. Once this was done, I was hoping to go into Parallels Image Tool and decreasing the size of the partition. I have been unable to find any confirmation that this approach works. Some have suggested processes that are convoluted at best. I was hoping that reversing the process would be just as straight forward. I hate experimenting in case I mess up the whole VM trying to do this.

Has anyone reduced the size of the VM as I outlined? If not, are there any fairly simple processes to do it?

Thanks....

 

I have a similar problem

I used the Image Tool to increase the size of my virtual hd, but inadvertently put in two too many zeros. The Image Tool apparently only goes in one direction--up, not down. So I've got an hdd that's theoretically 10x larger than my actual hd. And since it apparently can't expand above its original size in action, I keep getting alerts about my lack of disk space.

Some in reducing the size would be really helpful.

 

Is there no response at all to these questions? Does anyone from Parallels read this stuff?

 

http://www.parallels.com/en/download/file/doc/Parallels_Image_Tool_User_Guide.pdf page 22 last post
first post no guarantee from Parallels , use at your own risk - in case of error you can lose all data
http://uneasysilence.com/archive/2007/01/9404/

 

Alas, the user guide (Chapter 5) does not provide any information about downsizing a virtual hard disk. I've got the same problem; my virtual HDD is bloated to 27 GB but only contains < 5GB of files, including the OS.

Please advise if there is a solution.

 

Actually it does,
If you have plain disk use Parallels Image Tools, and convert it to expanding
after that use compact from Configuration Editor- Hard Disk 1 -advanced -compact