Not enough disk space available to start the Windows virtual machine but there is ennough

Hi everybody,

I am running Parallels on a MacBook Pro 2019 (Intel-based) with macOS 12.3 and Parallels 17.1.2.
Especially, when shutting down one VM and starting another one, I get the message "There's not enough disk space available to start the Windows virtual machine." I shall free up roundabout 1400 MB. However, on my hard disc there are more than 80GB left. And if I reboot the Mac, the same disk space is left and I can start the VM again without any problems.
Does Parallels miss to delete some temporary stuff or what is the reason why this happens?

Thanks for your support

 

Hello, @WolfgangM12 Could you please confirm that you are trying to open the second virtual machine after completely shutting down the first virtual machine? Because if two virtual machines are running at a time in the background(check in activity monitor) of a Mac it will consume more memory and You need to free disk space at least equal to the amount of memory allocated to the Virtual Machine. Go to your virtual machine's Configuration > Hardware > CPU & Memory to check. Also please perform a complete 'First Aid' to the Macintosh HD from the disk utility and restart the Mac and then check the disk space. Thanks.

 

Hello @Nazeemabanu@Parallels, it's already quite a long time ago, however, the other Windows was shut down. Probably the fullscreen window with the Play button remained or it was completely closed. There is also a high chance that both happened while I was trying this for several times. It even worked at the beginning with both VMs in parallel which of course got remarkable slower but at least it worked. Anyway, I can confirm that the free disk space on my hard disk was roundabout 80 GB.

 

Hi Rachel, thanks for your input.
The available memory on my hard disc has several times the size of the RAM provided to the virtual machine. My current solution is to activate the clean up memory on shutdown feature in the settings for the virtual machine. Since then, I did not yet run into this issue again.