First off, it worked. When i tried to migrate a windows 2003 enterprise server from a notebook to my firewiredisk there was an error at about 20 gigs (that took a day also). so i freed up 55 gigs of space (my macbook hd is 80 gigs, the disk to import has 55, 53 already used) i've kicked off printer drivers and moved a lot of programs to external disks. the migration took 58 hours to import. the source computer is an asus 1,5 Ghz Pentium M, 2x 512MB DDR 333mhz, said 55 gb harddisk with 4200u/min. i dont know whats the exactly accessrate, but since its not yet SATA i doubt it has more than 40 megs/s. the ethernet is 100MBit. Since the first try aborted i shortened the way pc -> gigabit-switch (16port) -> macbook -> firewire hd (IDE, too) to direct access between pc and macbook. the speed did not increase from that, but it worked out. i had a weird configuration for speedstep drivers and stuff, but finally it works. but ... i wonder... what took 58 hours to do. since i watch my network speed i can say that import speed went round about 300kbyte/s ... which is even the half of what my internet gives me - so this is very slow in my eyes. now after that i was done i took some of the stuff inside the guest OS out and wanted to DECREASE its size, since my os x is going to be unusable among 1 gigabyte free space left on harddisk. i tried the defrag tool, in the hope of having a shrinked VM. but the defrag aborted, since there wasnt enough space... i guess parallels tries to adress another 55gigabytes ??? my main questions are: why does it take so much time to import an average ms operating system, and how do i DECREASE the filesize of a grown VM ? edit: corrected the hours
