Shrinking VM drive

I am running macOS Sierra as a guest under Parallels Desktop 16 running in a Catalina host. I know the VM hard drive can be resized to give more space to the VM. However, is the any way to reduce the size of the VM hard drive? The 256GB currently allocated to the VM hard drive is far more than I need. Related to this, is there a way to safely remove pre-installed apps in the guest OS? Most of these are available in the host Catalina OS and are not needed in the guest.

 

Hello, please check this blog article and let us know if it's not that case.

 

No this does not work. When I try to configure the Hard Disk, if I uncheck the Expanding Disk tick box, everything is grayed out. I have no ability to reduce the virtual HDD below the minimum of 256GB. Disk Utility reports that I am using about 33GB on the volume macOS Sierra-0 SSD media and I do not anticipate needing much more than that. My use of the Sierra VM is limited to running Lightroom and PS. I can do everything else I need to on the Catalina host. Not being able to reduce the size of the HDD is very frustrating inasmuch as it strands about 150 or more GB of physical drive.

 

@Maria@Parallels this KB Article refers to w Windows Guest, not macOS.
@Barry4 the implementation is not fuool proof. What I do is this:
- Go to Configure>Hardware and add a disk with the "Expanding disk" option checked. This disk will only take about as much space as yu are actually using.
- Boot into the system
- Downlaod an use Carbon Copy Cloner v5 to clone your system
- Shutdown
- Change the Boot order in Confguruation to boot from the new disk first
- Boot to check that it works. Use Startup Disk in Preferences to double check the startup disk
- Shut down and go to Configure to delete the disk sending the data files to the Trash
You now should have a cleaned system only taking what is required. Shut down periodically to let Parallels clean up.
I think Snapshots will interfere with shrinking. I also found that the shrink is not fool proof even when lookign for Snaphsot on Mojave and up. Periodically I have to use this method to shrink the VM. BTW, On VMware Fusion this is the ONLY way to manage the creeping disk size problem.

 

Thanks. I'll give this a try.

 

Worked as advertised. Appreciate the post.

 

thanks so much! it works well.

 

Hi Harald, thank you so much for your advice. I have some problems when booting from the new disk.
I deleted the old disk and create a new smaller one, which seems nice. But I cannot start windows on the new disk because I am not familiar with cloning things. Could you please give some details about the step three "clone your system"?

 

This might not work as well with Windows as with macOS.
- macOS can simply b e copied to another disk and will boot.
- Generally you can simply shut down the Windows VM and Parallels will shrink the disk.
- If you change the virtual Windows "hardware" architecture, you might have to run sysprep before that. This way Windows "thinks" it is a fresh install and reconfigures itself as if it were the first boot after an install.
- If you deleted you original disk you might have to re-install.

 

Deeply appreciate your reply.