Reduce size of virtual HD - how to?

[bidione]

Can I use Acronis Disk Director that comes bundled with Parallels in the Limited Edition to reduce the size of my virtual Windows HD under Parallels (not creating two separate partitions, but simply reduce the size of the existing HD)? I have set the size of the virtual Windows HD to 125GB when I first installed Parallels - thought I would do most of my work in Windows and now realize that I would like to do/save more under Mac but do have too little space left on my Mac HD (only 50GB for Mac and 125GB for Windows HD).

If this can not be donein Disk Director, is there any other way to reduce the size of the virtual Windows HD? Also, I seem to have the Windows HD set to a fixed size rather than expanding when making the initial Parallels setup. As of today, I don't think that was smart at all and would rather want to change this, too. How can this be done?

Thx!

 

[Lew]

I used the instructions provided by MarkHolbrook below to enlarge my vm and it worked as advertised. Follow his instructions and you should have no problems.

Lew

1) FIRST and MOST IMPORTANT - Make a complete copy of your VM in case something goes wrong!!!
2) Download or buy Acronis True Image
3) Install it in your VM
4) Shutdown your VM, using Parallels create a new virtual HD of the size you want. It will/should show up as drive D:
5) Start up your VM. Run Acronis and "clone" your image from C to D. Acronis has some options so read them carefully. You want a true clone.
6) Shutdown your VM.
7) In Parallels set the new volume as your primary HD. In my case I removed the other volume complete. I figured since I had a complete copy from step 1 I was safe.
8) Reboot into parallels and your VM. You should have a bigger disk now!

 

[bidione]

Thanks Lex. I already stumbled over this post - but it does not address my issue for the following reasons:

1. It asks to clone the exisiting virtual HD and the copy it back to a new volume. I assume if the original volume is larger than the new one, the clone will not copy back as there is not enough space on the new volume - right? So the new volume can not be smaller than the old one - which is exactly what I would like to achieve! Seems this way only works if one want to increase rather than decrease the size of a volume.

2. I do not have enough space on my Mac HD left to have two volumes (c + D) at the same time. Out of the 160GB of my Mac HD, 125 are reserved for my current C-volume (about 60GB currently used) and some 35 for Mac. So there is no way for me to add another D-volume of the required size and copy a clone of the current C-volume to.

I had hoped that Acronis Disk Director would allow to reduce the size of my current C-volume instead! Or find another way to reduce size of this volume.

 

[brkirch]

Just use Parallels Image Tool (located in the same folder as the Parallels Desktop application) to convert your virtual disk to expanding.

 

[bidione]

Just use Parallels Image Tool (located in the same folder as the Parallels Desktop application) to convert your virtual disk to expanding.

Thanks. Tried this immediately - unfortunately with no result. Imagetool tells me that it needs more free harddisk space to performa this action. Basically, it asks me for the same amount of hd-space as my current virtual C-drive has - as the virtual HD has 125GB I would need another 125GB on my Mac HD to convert the virtual HD from fixed to variable size. As the total size of the Mac HD is only 160 there is no way I could allocate 2x125GB to this process.

I will probably have to copy the harddisk-imagefile to another hd (external) and try the whole process there - if there is no other way to get the size of my c-drive reduced!

 

[bidione]

I just saw that ImageTool offers the option to separate the existing virtual HD into several smaller partitions. Would it be possible to create two separate partitions from my 125GB volume (where a 60GB partition has all my data and a 65GB partition is empty) and then simply delete the empy 65GB partition. This would leave me with just one virtual hd of 60GB which I could then convert from fixed to variable size.

At least this sounds like a possible way if ... ImageTool will allow me to delete a partition after splitting up my current virtual HD. Anyone knows if this is a possible route??