Parallels Eating My Hard Disk Space!

hkjon · Apr 18, 2007

When I try to start my Vista VM, I get the message:

Only 429 MB of free space remains in the /Users/xxx file system. Guest operating system is unable to run until at least 512 MB free disk is available. Please free some disk space.
Click OK if you cleared enough disk space or click Cancel to shutdown the Virtual Machine.

However, when I click cancel to close the VM, and get info on the /Users/xxx folder in Mac OS, it shows that 1.89 GB of space is available. It appears that on starting the VM, Parallels is reserving nearly 1.5 GB of space in addition to the 512 MB that it says it needs. Is this normal, and is there a way of changing it, other than deleting stuff from my HDD?

Macbook (black), 1GB RAM, standard config

crazibri · Apr 18, 2007

Do you really only have 2 gigs of space left on your hard drive? If so your computer might be running slower than you probably want. I'd suggest upgrading the hard drive (since its a laptop) or buying an external drive to store those unnecessary files that you dont use as often.

I realize that Parallels is eating your hard drive when you launch a VM, but generally you want 1.5-2.5 as much freedisk space as you have memory just for swap and general operations. Running 2 operating systems (OSX and a VM) is definitely a memory hog so thats why I suggest getting more HD space.

Eru Ithildur · Apr 18, 2007

Yeah, you definetly need more space. Always try to keep 10-15% of your drive open. Min. It kills you if you don't. Trust me, I was there, done that.

tacit_one · Apr 18, 2007

hkjon said:
When I try to start my Vista VM, I get the message:

Only 429 MB of free space remains in the /Users/xxx file system. Guest operating system is unable to run until at least 512 MB free disk is available. Please free some disk space.
Click OK if you cleared enough disk space or click Cancel to shutdown the Virtual Machine.

However, when I click cancel to close the VM, and get info on the /Users/xxx folder in Mac OS, it shows that 1.89 GB of space is available. It appears that on starting the VM, Parallels is reserving nearly 1.5 GB of space in addition to the 512 MB that it says it needs. Is this normal, and is there a way of changing it, other than deleting stuff from my HDD?

Macbook (black), 1GB RAM, standard config

That's right. We're preallocating some space on your drive - otherwise we would have to request this memory at runtime - wich will lead to the data loss in low memory conditions (like yours).
I guess you better free some space on your drive... I really don't see any other way here.

hkjon · Apr 18, 2007

Thanks for the advice. Forgot to mention that the reason I have so little disc space on the Mac OSX partition is that before I discovered Parallels, I installed bootcamp and set the partition size for my Win XP partition too large: 80GB. Duh! So I have an XP Bootcamp partition with loads of spare space I can't use. I understand from reading these and Apple's forums that I can't reduce the size of the Windows partition. Looks like I will have to ditch the Windows XP Bootcamp partition and start again...

wingdo · Apr 19, 2007

tacit_one said:
That's right. We're preallocating some space on your drive - otherwise we would have to request this memory at runtime - wich will lead to the data loss in low memory conditions (like yours).
I guess you better free some space on your drive... I really don't see any other way here.

If Parallels is pre-allocating disk space for memory to prevent low memory situations, do we need to have virtual memory enabled in XP? Disabling VMemory would increase performance of the virtual machine dramatically. With 2GB in my Dell at work, I do not have a paging file and have never had an issue.

tacit_one · Apr 20, 2007

wingdo said:
If Parallels is pre-allocating disk space for memory to prevent low memory situations, do we need to have virtual memory enabled in XP? Disabling VMemory would increase performance of the virtual machine dramatically. With 2GB in my Dell at work, I do not have a paging file and have never had an issue.

Well, generally this is not a good idea. Leaving guest operating system without swap may seriously harm its performance. I wouldn't recommend you to do that.

wesley · Apr 20, 2007

Interestingly, I did disable swapfile on my WinXP VM, which has 512MB allocated. I haven't had much, if any, problems.

wingdo · Apr 20, 2007

tacit_one said:
Well, generally this is not a good idea. Leaving guest operating system without swap may seriously harm its performance. I wouldn't recommend you to do that.

So then what exactly is your .mem file doing? The longest part of my boot process is your creating the 1.5GB file. The earlier post implied it was used in case your guest machine ran short on memory, if that is the case it would seem the guest swapfile is not required.

If the .mem file is for "suspending" the VM, two questions come to mind. First, since a lot of us do not use suspend, why not create the file when suspend is chosen? Second, why is it 1.5GB when I am only allocating 512MB to the guest?