Autoexpanding harddrive

Hi folks,
when I installed Parallels WM Beta 1, I choose 4GB expanding harddrive. Now I'm using beta6 and the drive is almost full. I used the new image tool to make it bigger - 6.5GB but WinXP still display it as 3.99GB. What am I missing?

 

You've expanded the "physical" hard drive, but that doesn't necessarily change XP's view of the world. I would expect inside the VM you'd need something like Partition Magic to resize the partition.

 

This would be good to know. If we hit the size limit we hit when setting up we can expand farther by using something like PM? I would think PM will see the disk as the size we set when setting up. I'll try Pm latter if I get a chance.

 

What I did was to download a free Linux rescue disk that has a full suite of tools, including a partition magic clone. Google this file: "systemrescuecd-x86-0.2.18.iso" and download it. I then attached the .iso image to the Parallels virtual pc CD Rom drive and changed the boot order to CdRom first. Be sure to select " connect on startup". When you restart the pc, it should boot to the rescue disk. Launch the partition program and resize your partition.

This worked like a charm for me, as now windows can see my new, larger partition.

 

A really really nice addition to would be real resizing with Parallels, making the image and partition bigger or smaller.

There was a time when I installed XP, all the updates, cleaned it up, and then cloned it to a less than 1 gig partition to save space.

If Parallels could at least expand the image and partition size without a tool like Partition Magic and it could shrink images of unused space, maybe that'd be good enough. It would be great.

 

I can confirm that Partition Magic does allow you to resize the Windows partition in this scenario. I increased the size of a 4 GB image created with Parallels Beta 1 to 20 GB using image tools in Beta 6. I then used Partition Magic inside XP to increase the partition to use all 20 GBs. Not even a restart of windows was necessary.

 

Thanks RussGJohnson: Now I have free space!

It worked wonderfully for me, too!

0. MAKE A COPY OF YOUR HARD DRIVE IMAGE BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING!!! Run Parallels Image Tool to expand the maximum size of your hard drive image. Windows won't see any more space. You still need to repartition.
1. Go to http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page
2. I recommend you read the FAQ page. Download the .iso image (the right one to download is the link that says x86)
3. Open Parallels and click on CD/DVD-ROM. Select "Use image file" radio button. Click on the [...] button and browse to navigate to the place where you downloaded the .iso file. Select it and click "open." Make sure "Enabled" and "Connect at startup" are selected.
4. Click "OK" and you are back to the console view.
5. Click on "Boot sequence" and check "CD-ROM, Hard Disk, Floppy."
6. Start the VM. You'll see a System Rescue welcome screen, and it will tell you to press "Enter" to boot. Press "Enter." It will boot into Linux. There are some choices you'll be asked to make. I just accepted all the defaults.
7. When it is done booting, it will give you a root@sysresccd /root %" prompt. Type run_qtparted at the prompt. (The instructions further up the the screen tell you to do this if you want to run the Partition Magic clone)
8. After one more default to accept, a nice GUI interface comes up. You should see your hard drive image in the left-hand window. Click on it. It will show you the partitions on your hard drive in the right-hand window. There should be a little Windows icon next to your startup partition. Under the "operations" menu click "resize" and use the arrows or type numbers to resize your startup partition. Click "OK."
9. Now under the "device" menu click "commit." This will resize your partition.
10. Quit and power off your machine. Go back to the CD-DVD-ROM options screen and de-enable at startup, and you may as well de-select the .iso file image.
11. Start your VM and it will boot into Windows. You will have a resized partition and plenty of free space! As a note, after I did this, Windows knew I had done something funny, because it ran chkdsk. I let it run and everything checked out OK. It started up fine and I now have lots of free space, and better yet, a way to give myself even more free space if I need it.
12. Be a nice person and click on "Make a Donation" on the System Resuce website. Partition Magic costs $18.99. You just saved yourself $18.99. So give them something less than that just to say thanks.

THANK YOU, RussGJohnson!!

 

Your welcome. Nice job on documenting all of the details of the process!!!

 

Should it really be so hard?

Hm,
the step-by-step howto is really great, but I think it's to hard for regular users. I believe this should be resolved in final version somehow. If Parallels guys doesn't want to introduce their own utility, than there should be a similar how to in the help pages.
My opinion is that the Image Tool should have an option to really make the hard drive bigger.

 

The problem is Windows limitation not PW. Parallels gave us a tool to expand the size of the disk, they did there job. The question is: How would you handle this on a real workstation?

Scenario: You install Windows on a 8GB drive. The disk is almost full.. how do you get it to a bigger disk? The only choice you have is to buy a bigger disk and clone it. You need a third party tool to do this.

Same goes for PW. Now.. they gave you a tool to expand the partition (yay free hdd upgrade!) but you need to find a way to clone/expand the partition itself.

My 2c anyway.

 

I don't argue that PW did their job. I just believe that users will want this functionality.It's a little bit hard to explain - yeah, you expanded your drive using our tool, but the same remained the same inside Windows. You need another utility to make it really bigger.

 

What tool have they given us to expand the size of the disk? I do understand that expanding the size of the partition inside whatever os is not their problem.

 

Look, parallels can run multiple OS's and file systems, each which demands it's own file utility. The bottom line is if you want to expand your partition on this "computer" or your beige box, you need a utility to do it. The above documented procedure is not that complicated, and best of all it's free.

Just my opinion.

 

The tool they have given us is in the new Parallel's folder created in Beta 6. It is called Imagetool.

 

Russ,
I'm an macosx server administrator and the documented procedure is not hard for me. I find it great and the price... you know. But I cannot imagine my users to follow it, I just don't want to get their support calls. This is the reason why I think, that it should be solved somehow in the FC.

 

You just answered your own question. Users shouldn't mess with that if they can't follow the basic instructions given. Would you ask these same users to clone a real hdd and upgrade it themselves? Didn't think so.

The problem here is that their are WAAAAAAY too many file systems for Parallels to support in what you are asking. Expanding the disk file itself is not hard.. proof they already have the tool out. Expand different file systems (not just ntfs/fat32/fat16 here... but also ext2/ext3/reiserfs/hpfs, etc) is an all other ball game. That's why 3rd party tools exist and it why Quest Software made tons of money with Partition Magic.

 

That's true. But Parallels is stepping into a new area, into a market where users expect easy solutions. It should be there at least for NTFS/FAT32.

 

Ok.. how did Virtual PC do it?

 

I hope that VirtualPC is not the ideal model for Parallels

 

I ran into the same problem in vmware running win2003 guest and found the following solution (after having considered acronis, pm and so on). M$ actually have a solution for this, it's called sysprep. Sysprep when run will do a mini setup on next boot, if you make the sysprep.inf file correct this minisetup should be fully automated and takes about 5 minutes. The trick is a parameter( ExtendOemPartition = 1 ) in the sysprep.inf file that tells minisetup to expand the primary disk to fill all available space.

1: download sysprep from ms.
2: make a sysprep.inf file and fil inn the following fields:
;SetupMgrTag
[Unattended]
ExtendOemPartition = 1
OemSkipEula=Yes
[GuiUnattended]
AdminPassword="XXXXX"
EncryptedAdminPassword=NO
AutoLogon=Yes
OEMSkipRegional=1
TimeZone=95
OemSkipWelcome=1
[UserData]
ProductKey=XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX
FullName="Tarantell"
OrgName="Tarantell"
ComputerName=*
[LicenseFilePrintData]
AutoMode=PerServer
AutoUsers=100
[SetupMgr]
DistFolder=C:\sysprep\i386
DistShare=windist
[Identification]
JoinWorkgroup=WORKGROUP
[Networking]
InstallDefaultComponents=Yes

Tip: ComputerName=* means that the computername will be set to company name (Tarantell) + random number (for example: Tarantell-34533)

3: copy all sysprep files including sysprep.inf to c:\sysprep\
4: run sysprep.exe, reseal and shutdown.
5: Expand the disk using the parallels disk tool
6: reeboot the image and wait untill minisetup completes.