I want my hard drive back!

[londongeezer21]

When I purchased my Mac desktop a few years ago, it had the 1TB hard drive. I was converting from Windows to Apple with all my devices. Great. But with the differences in systems, and the Mac not working with a few PC programmes, I decided to split the hard drive 50-50., giving both systems 500 gig each.
I am less with windows now and would like to get back around 400 gig from the parallels system to use with the Mac side.
I still need windows for a few minor bits.

Is this possible?
How do I do it.?

Some very clever people out there!
Can you help?

 

[Andrew@Parallels]

As I understand you want to get rid of the BootCamp partition and continue using Windows only in Parallels Desktop virtual machine - right?
Parallels Desktop offers an option to migrate BootCamp into VM
The problem here is that your Mac HD is split 50/50 and Parallels Desktop will require 500 GB to migrate Windows. Basically this is not an option for you.

However, you can do it another way. You will need 600+ GB external hard drive to do that.
See the steps below:
1. Boot your Mac to the BootCamp (Windows side)
2. Plug in the external drive to the Mac
3. Migrate Windows (Windows PC in this tutorial = BootCamp on your Mac)
4. Once the migration is completed, restart your Mac and boot to Mac OS
5. Re-plug the external device to make sure it's properly connected to the Mac side
6. Start Parallels Desktop
7. Open up Finder and double-click on the .pvm file (which is your migrated VM). It will automatically register your virtual machine.
8. Shutdown VM and shrink the size of your virtual machine. See Editing Disk section for instructions. I'd shrink it to somewhere around 60 GB.
9. Copy the .pvm file from external drive to your native Mac HD (make sure you have 60 GB or whatever value available on your Mac side). The default location is /Documents/Parallels
10. Double-click on .pvm file you've just copied to register the VM
11. Once you make sure it works fine, you can get rid of your BootCamp - see Apple KB for info.

Hope this helps!