Simply CANNOT shink a drive size!!!

I was using a small 40GB USB drive connected to my Macbook with an XP Pro SP2 image on it.
The HDD size was around 32GB but with Windows actually occupying around 20GB, it was fine. I would never install anything new - simply do my work everyday and that's not much space asked.

Suddenly the 32GB started growing then hit the max of the USB drive.
I had to copy the file to a bigger external drive.

Then ran Compressor - Funnily it got the file (40GB then) bigger while defragmenting (to 48GB)! Then when compacting it, it dropped to 41GB.

Windows is still using 20GB only! However the virtual HDD is stuck on using twice the amount.

Any help would be much appreciated, thanks.

ps: I am using the latest build 5160 on v3.0

 

Nobody?

A bit stuck here with 'the growing drive that's gone too big for no reason'

Thanks

 

Hello,

please, follow these steps:
1. Open Parallels and start windows
2. go to the Actions menu and click on Create Snapshot
3. In the snapshot window just click the OK Button

4. Shut down windows using the shutdown feature in windows
5. Turn off Parallels

6. Go to Applications/Parallels and open Parallels Image Tool
7. Click Continue on the Introduction Page
8. Click Choose on the source image page.
9. Select your HDD
10. Click Continue

11. Select Manage disk Properties in the action screen, Click continue
12. In the Operations screen put a checkmark in the Merge snapshots item only. And click the Start button.
13. A warning Message will drop down, Click Yes
14. The Image tool will start to process your HDD this can take a long time be patient
15. When The process completes click finish

Next boot the VM:
It is normal for this to take a little longer than usual.

Finally Run Disc Compressor:

18. Go to Actions on the toolbar and select Run Parallels Copressor......
19. A dropdown menu will appear with a message on it click ok
20. A countdown will begin, allow it to start automatically
21. The Compressor will start the first set of operations this can take some time.
22. After the first operations have completed Click on the restart button
23. After the restart the next set of operations will start again this will take some time to complete. When the compression is completed the compacting of the disk will begin automatically. This can take hours to complete. Do not interrupt it, suspend your Mac or put it into sleep mode during this process.
24. When Compacting is completed click on the OK button.
25. Click Finish on the Compressor Window.

Clean Up
26. Go to the Macintosh HD/Users/your user name/documents/parallels/your virtual machine/ and delete the Snapshots folder and the Snapshots.xml

 

not working for me

I did this and after it said the shrink was complete, I got a windows error that said

"can't find drive d: please enter disk"

I shutdown parallels and relaunched. My disk is the same size. I have a 32 GB disk image and I am only using 6 GBs. I want to shrink that down to about 10 GBs.