How Do I Use Extra HD Space?

M

mrdalej

Member
I have a Windows XP Home that was formatted to be a FAT 32 HD and I used the Parallels Image.Tool and expanded it to 16GB and I still could not use the second 8GB. I used a hint supplied on this forum to "Convert C;/fs:NTFS" and this worked just great as I now have NTFS formatted HD of Expanding type.

I still can not find a way to use the second 8GB.

So I went back to the Parallels Image.Tool and increased my HD to 25GB. So now I have 8GB usable and 16GB unallocated?

How can I get this to all be one big happy HD?

Am I beating a dead horse and should I just punt and start fresh or is there hope that I can make this one big happy HD?

Thanks In Advance group. :)
 
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As I posted to your previous topic, you must re-size your 8gb partition up to whatever size your virtual drive is. It is exactly the same thing that you have to do on a real hard drive. Windoze does not provide this capability in any of it's versions because it assumes that there is only one partition on a disk that occupies the entire disk. It gets them out of a lot of support issues by playing dumb on the issue of multiple partitions and larger disk conversions.

Get a disk utility that re-sizes partitions! Re-size your 8gb partition up to whatever size your virtual drive is now. This is not really a Parallels problem, but a windoze problem. Google for it. Repeating, Partition Magic is one solution for re-sizing, but there are many.

The 'expanding type' is a Parallels feature that only allocations virtual disk space as it is required - but it is ONLY ever one partition and stops at the max you initially specified.

If you can't get your brain around this, just create a new partiton using Disk Managment under the Computer Management utility. Format it using that utility, and put things on it instead of your c: drive. There is no real need to use only 'one big happy HD'. As a matter of fact you are better of using more than one - even in non-VM windoze. That way when windoze destroyes itself you will have all of your data on a different drive and not have to worry about over-writing it when you re-install windoze.
 
Reading this response, I was a bit confused. Here's another explanation of how disks work in somewhat different words:

First, disks in a VM are virtual disks represented by a file in the host OS. they have the extension .hdd in the VM folder on the HOST disk. You can have as many of them as you have room for on your Mac, and can connect up to three of them at a time to your VM (unless you give up the CD drive, whence you can connect four virtual hard disks). These represent emulated physical hard disks.

Each of these virtual disk drives can have as many partitions as your guest can create and handle since the format of the virtual disk is completely under control of the guest.

Using Windows, you can create at least four partitions on EACH virtual disk, and format them with the FAT32 or the NTFS filesystem. Each partition can be anything from the minimum size allowed by the guest, to the maximum size allowed by the guest or the total unpartitioned space on the VIRTUAL drive whichever is less. You set the size of the virtual drive when you create it or change its size with the disk image tool.

Changing the size of the virtual disk with the image tool is the equivalent of changing the physical size of a disk in a real machine, and has nothing to do with the partition size (which does not change). If you expand a virtual disk, you can use the space either by expanding the existing partition (or last partition if there is more than one) in a separate step using a third party tool, or by creating another partition using either file system (which does not have to be the same type as the existing partition), and assign it another drive letter and use it as another disk. Setting up another partition using the newly created unpartitioned space is the same as doing the same thing with a real physical disk on a real machine.

Another approach to getting more disk space is to create another .hdd file and attach it to your VM. This is the same thing as adding a physical disk to a real machine. You can create one or more partitions on the new disk and format them with any file system you like. One advantage to a second .hdd is that you can back them up separately. Another advantage is that damage to one .hdd file may not affect the other.

If you decide to expand a disk image, and expand the single partition inside it, you can do this with either FAT32 or NTFS. You do not need to convert to NTFS to expand a partition. To do this, download the GPARTED live CD from http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php

Attach this download as a CD image, and boot from it. Accept all the defaults, and follow the on screen instructions. Expand your partition. Then disconnect the CD, reset your boot options to hard disk, and you will have a nice new enlarged partition.

BE SURE TO BACK UP YOUR .HDD FILE BEFORE YOU START.

Have fun.
 
Sorry for your confusion - guess I should have written a book all about how to use windoze disks like you did. I'll try harder the next time.
 
How do I Attach & Boot from it?

Good morning group. I downloaded GPARTED liveCD and it is an image on my desktop.

I went into Parallels and booted windows and did not see a way to attach from there.

So I quit Windows and went into Boot sequence and tried to add a disk image and it will not attach??

Help please.

Thanks In Advance.

dale j :)
 
I have even burned the livecd to a real cd and I do not see a way to boot from it. I went into Parallels and told it to start widt the CD and then to move to the HD and I did not even hear the CD spin?

Any advice would help.

TIA

dale j
 
This problem has been discussed many times here. To boot from a CD, the CD needs to be on controller 0:0 and the boot sequence as to start with CD. The .hdd you want to operate on can be on any other controller address (0:0, 1:0, 1:1)
I've used that live CD several times, and it worked fine for me.
 
I know I must be missing something here.
1. While logged in with Safari I got the GPARTED liveCD
2. I had an image on the desktop I could not attach to.
3. I used burn to copy the info from the GPARTED liveCD image to a CD that I name "livecd"
4. I went into Parallels and changed the boot order and set the CD to 0:0 & HD to 1:0

5. When I try and boot I get a notice there is no OS on the CD

So I though I must need to download this file from WinXP and I did it twice and each time it wanted to know what kind of application it should use to open the ISO image?

Sorry for being a pain but thanks for all of the help.

dale j
 
Make sure the downloaded image has the extension .iso
In Parallels, edit the CD ROM, above where you changed the controller slot, select Use Disk Image, and browse to the downloaded image (I put it in my ~/library/parallels folder for convenience but it can be anywhere on your Mac HD) and select it.

Start the VM and is should boot.
 
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