How to decrease Virtual Disk size?

N

Nathan Hall

Bit poster
I have a MBP with 100gb. I have reached my max disk capacity and have to quit the VM as I keep going below the minimum 500mb for it to operate. It's virtual disk size is 32gb. I only need like 12gb. How can I change this w/o losing my apps & data? I don't know if it's an expanding or 'plain' set-up either. I'd appreciate any help you wonderful people could provide.

Oh yea, I'm using parallels 3.0 build 5160.
 
In the same situation

I just moved all my VM files to an external hard disk FW800 La Cie by cloning them and run them from there.

Also all my images

Hugh W
 
Nathan Hall,

it would be really more convenient to use Parallels Compressor for that purpose. While your VM is running, go to Actions -> Run parallels Compressor.

Best regards,
Alicia.
 
What exacty does the Compressor do? I have 32gig alloted to the VM, I just want to decrease that. Wont the compressor just shrink the 8gig of the 32gig that I am using????
 
@ Nathan Hall,

I know you want an immediate answer, but you should really read the documentation already installed along with Parallels.

Refer to /Applications/Parallels/ and take a look at "Parallels Desktop for Mac User Guide.pdf". It explains that Compressor is installed along with Parallels and how it can be used.

If you're having trouble applying the steps outlined there, you may find insight on these forums.
 
Compressor won't Compress

Hi, I am having the same problem. Until Office for Mac 2007 comes out I am a bit of a slave to the XP side of things since our office is all XP driven except for my MacBook Pro. Things have been working well and I am migrating to OSX as best I can. However, at 107 GB my XP VM Disk is bloated. It has 80 GB of data and I need that room, or at least some of it, on the OSX size since I keep getting the "<500 MB" error message from Parallels that completely halts the VM. I have run compressor but it says it won't compress because it's has snapshots or is a plain disk. I tried to delete the snapshots and I still get the same error message about having snapshots "OR" a plain disk. Since I have limited OSX space it seems it won't convert my VM to a dynamic VM (or whatever it's called when it's not plain). I seem to be stuck without enough HD space to make anything happen and it's only getting worse. At this point I am deleting things on the OSX side to keep the VM running and it's sitting there with 20 GB free. Please help! Thanks!
 
Hello,

try to perform the following:
1. Shut down the virtual machine. Click Start and choose Shut Down.
2. Close Parallels.
3. Browse to the Applications - Parallels folder and start Parallels Image Tool.
4. Choose the required virtual hard disk of the virtual machine and choose the "merge snapshots" option. This will take a while.
5. Delete the snapshot folder and snapshots.xml file located in the virtual machine folder (Documents - Parallels - virtual machine folder - snapshots folder)
6. Open Parallels and the virtual machine.
7. Try to compress the virtual disk once again.

Best regards,
Alicia.
 
Thank you

Hi Alicia,

Thank you for helping me with the VM size reduction. It worked. The only stumble I had was that the Snapshots were located in

Users - Users - Library - Parallels - virtual machine folder - snapshots folder

Thank you again for helping me. It seems to have cleared up my problem and now I have about 30 Gigs over on the MacOSX side. If the Windows VM needs more space will it now still expand as needed? Please let me know, thanks!

Technonut2000
 
Hello,

my bad, older versions of Parallels have their files located in Library, not Documents, but it's great you've managed to find it anyway :)
And here is some information about expanding disс that your VM has.

Best regards,
Alicia.
 
My 'merge snapshots' process never finishes. It runs for a long time and the progress bar gets al the way to the end but then it doesn't respond. No successful or error messages are shown.
 
Hello,

please, open you Parallels folder, right-click the .hdd file and choose 'Show package contents'. Are there any .hds files?

Best regards,
Alicia.
 
What does it mean if there are .hds files inside the package?

I am having the same problem (VHD not compressing). I deleted the snapshots from the snapshot manager before I started, so there is no "merge snapshot" option available. I also did not find snapshot folders in the library file (I moved the snapshots.xml file).

There is an .hds file in my HDD package.
 
Hello,

automandc, could you please specify how exactly your hard drive is not compressing?
The compressing issue can be caused by bad fragmenattion so you can try to do the following: increase just a little your virtual HD with Image Tool and then try to run Compressor again - it should work. Please, write me back about the results.
And as for .hds file, it is normal that it exists.

Best regards,
Alicia.
 
I did as you suggested, but still no luck shrinking the drive. This virtual drive has a significant amount of unallocated space. My original XP machine had 5 separate partitions when I migrated it over via Transporter. I have gotten rid of all of the partitions except for the system partition, which is about 25GB allocated, 10GB in use. There is approx. 90GB of unallocated (i.e., not partitioned) space on the virtual drive. The .hdd file is about 40GB in size.

Any help you can give in reducing the bloat so that I have only the system partition in use taking up space would be really appreciated. Since this is an image of my work machine, reinstalling/building from scratch is not an appealing option.

Thanks.
 
Virtual Disk does not decrease in size

I too am having a similar problem. I initially allocated 30 gB for my virtual drive. I am only using a little over 6 gB and would like to decrease the size of the virtual disk. I have no snapshots. Undo disk is no checked. System restore in Windows XP is not active. I have repeatedly run Compressor and it never frees up the unused space. I always get a reported hard disk size of 30 gB. I must not have a setting checked somehow, but I have repeatedly scanned the forums and the instructions and can not come up with a reason why I can not decrease the size of my virtual disk. I am using Parallels 3.0 build 5582.
 
I solved the problem using an inelegant solution. Here's what I did, your mileage may vary:

(1) Mounted the windows drive in linux VM (I just booted a VM from a SystemRescue disc image) and used GParted to shrink the Windows partition to the size I wanted (40GB down to 16GB)

(2) Created a new virtual HD the same size as the Windows partition (16GB) and used GParted to format/partition it. (I didn't do this, but it is ideal if the new blank partition is exactly the same size as the old one)

(3) Used the dd command in linux to copy the windows partition on the old VHD to the new partition on the new VHD, and also used dd to copy the MBR from the old VHD to the new. (Instructions found on the web -- google for "clone a windows drive with dd")

Ideally that would have been all, but since I wasn't smart enough to use the same size partitions, I had to boot into my original XP image, install the Windows Recovery console, and then use the fixboot and fixmbr commands to repair the new disk.

The upshot is, I now have a working XP image that is 11GB on the mac hard drive (Windows reports about 9.5GB in use). Also note that I keep my pagefile on a separate harddrive image that is used only for that and temp files. I would eliminate the page file before copying using dd. Also note, dd is pretty slow -- 16GB took about 30 minutes to copy.

If you attempt any of the above, make sure to backup your original first -- it is entirely at your own risk.
 
same problem: Parallels image tool > compress does not reduce the size...

I have the same problem as others.
the virtual disk (*.hdd) size is over 27GB, but actually I am only using 5GB or so.
The expanding disk size is 32 GB.

I tried to follow instructions to reduce the size, but even after running compress
in Parallels Image Tool, the size did not get reduced.

Is there anything I am missing? I would like help ASAP...

Also, could someone let me know how to reduced the expanding disk size to be less than 32GB?
I will never need that much virtual disk size, since I seldom need to use windows XP,
and most of the time I use MAC (OS 10.5.8).

Thanks!
 
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