Hi, I recently upgraded my macbook hdd to 160GB from 80GB (it already has 2GB of RAM) and so I thought that I would make a large windows image of 25GB, up from the 8GB I used to have. I also put it in it's own 30GB partition on the hdd. Now, this image takes a significantly longer to boot than the old 8GB image, to the point where it is almost not worth trying to open it up to do something quick in which is one of the major benfits of parallels. Has anyone else found this with large parallels images? I guess the other thing that I might have done that was bad was that when I moved from the 80GB drive to the 160GB drive, all I did was create one 30GB partition and one 130GBish partition and then copy all the stuff that was on the 80GB directly to the 130GB partition via firewire. Everything seems to working okay though and osx detects the correct size of the drive. Cheers Jim
Hello, is your virtual disc plain or expanding? Plain discs usually run faster, especially when the size of a virtual disc is quite large. Best regards, Alicia.
Hi Alicia, I can't remember which one I created and can't seem to find out where I can check either. I am guessing that as my disk currently says that it takes up around 9GB when I aimed to make it 25GB that it is expanding. Another quick question then, if I create a plain disk of 25GB, what is the maximum size that this disk will actually take up on my mac hdd? Cheers Jim
Hello, the file that stores an image of an expanding virtual disk and resides on your Mac OS X is small initially and grows as you add applications and data to the virtual hard disk in guest OS. In terms of the guest OS, the virtual hard disk capacity is fixed and equals to what you specified during virtual machine creation. In terms of the primary OS, the size of the virtual disk image file grows as you add new applications and data to the virtual hard disk. Using disks in this format saves space on the hard disk of your Macintosh computer. Let's assume you have created an expanding disk at the default size of 8GB. When you install Windows, let's say it will use up about 1.5GB. With the expanding drive, the actual footprint of the .hdd file in Finder will be the same 1.5GB. As you add files and install programs, the drive file will expand to contain them, up to 8GB. In contrast, if you have a plain disk at 8GB, Finder will read your .hdd file as 8GB, even if it's totally empty. Best regards, Alicia.
