Virtual Disk File Limits?

[RcktMan77]

How does Parallels, or any virtualization application for that matter, get around the 4GB OS file size restriction when it comes to the virtual disk image used to run a guest OS? For example my winxp.hdd file was ~1GB for just the OS (XP Pro). Am I really limited to only 3GB of storage space on this virtual disk? Or, is there a setting to increase this somewhere that I've missed? I keep getting these Windows pop-up messages telling me that I need to free-up space, which sucks by the way.

Thanks.

 

[joem]

Posting twice isn't helpful and wastes volunteer's time.

 

[palter]

How does Parallels, or any virtualization application for that matter, get around the 4GB OS file size restriction when it comes to the virtual disk image used to run a guest OS? For example my winxp.hdd file was ~1GB for just the OS (XP Pro). Am I really limited to only 3GB of storage space on this virtual disk? Or, is there a setting to increase this somewhere that I've missed? I keep getting these Windows pop-up messages telling me that I need to free-up space, which sucks by the way.

Thanks.

Not all file systems are limited to 4GB file sizes. FAT32 does indeed have such a limit. But, NTFS (Windows), HFS Extended (Mac), and ext2/3 (Linux) have an effectively unlimited file size.