Reduce disk size

[VIVEKG]

Hi everybody..
I am using parallels 4.0.3810 on my macbook pro. initially i was using boot camp and had made a partition of 195 GB for windows XP. later on i converted it into VM using parallels transporter.
Now the problem is that the disk size which windows shows in it is still 195 GB. out of it, i have just used 20 GB but the size of the parallels disk image is about 85 GB. i tried compressing the disk image, but it's of no use. even the snapshots are disabled, but i dnt know how the size of the disk image is so much. it's wasting a lot of hard disk space. is there any way that i can reduce the size of the windows virtual disk to arnd 30 GB from existing 195 GB. is there any other way to reduce the disk size of the virtual image?

 

[SarbjitS]

llo, I am experiencing the same problem. I migrated my Vista desktop to Parallels as a test and that image was about 120GB. I have deleted over 60GB of crap on one of the partitions and yet the virtual image still hasn't given the space back to the MAC drive.

How did you try to compress? Have you found anything else to solve this issue? I would hate to have to rebuild from scratch. Please advise.

 

[VIVEKG]

Finally, problem solved

After quite a bit of research, i was finally able to cure the problem. what happened was that while transporting the physical boot camp partition using parallels transporter, it created a virtual disk of some TB of size. i dnt know how it happened, but the size of the virtual machine became enormous. the actual size of the windows partition was arnd 20 GB, whereas the virtual machine file was arnd 85 GB and it was continuously increasing. i tried to compress it using parallels compressor, but it could only compress it by 1-2 GB and that was nothing.
Now, finally what i did was as follows:
1. downloaded acronis disk director suite from parallels website, and installed it in the virtual machine. (it asks for a key, which you can get from the parallels website if you are a registered user of the software, otherwise keygens are available on the internet).
2. created a new virtual hard disk of 25 GB in the virtual machine.
3. Copied the old disk to the newly created disk by using acronis disk director suite.
4. Changed the boot order of the virtual machine so that it booted from the newly created virtual disk.
5. once i saw the new hdd fully active and functional, i deleted the old virtual disk.
in this way, i was able to reduce the size of the virtual machine to 21 GB from initial size of 85 GB. this whole process took about 2 hrs.