virtual disk size, host disk size, and shrinking

D

DS28

Bit poster
I've read through some of the posts here about shrinking my virtual drive but I've still got some questions.

A friend did the installation for me on my MacBook, and gave me an expanding disk sized at 32 GB. However, I have never had that much space free on my hard drive. I checked and as of right now, my XP installation/HDD are only taking up 2 GB.

1) However, if I had my druthers, I would limit the size of the virtual disk because I'm rarely going to be using XP, and frankly, I don't trust Windows. I'm paranoid that it's going to take up more space because of poor data management etc etc. Is this even rational? I've read conflicting reports about whether I can expect my virtual drive to stay tiny (given that I won't be storing much on it, and only occasionally running 1 or 2 programs) or that it's going to suddenly and inexplicably chew up an inordinate amount of space.

2) How is Parallels able to allocate 32GB of space to the expanding disk if I've never, ever, had that much free space on my real drive?

3) Is there any way to decrease this allocation without going through the whole disk image process?


As it was a favor, I'd rather not ask him again to start fresh and re-install everything


Any info would be appreciated!
 
Just open the Disk Utility that came with Parallels and convert it to a non-expanding disc. Problem solved. If you ever need to expand it and Windows will not recognise the expantion, just follow the sticky thread under the Mac forum.
 
but...

I just tried that out and walked through the wizard (but haven't actually hit "start" yet). I see the option to convert it to a fixed size, but no options to actually *change* the size. If I convert a virtual disk (with a max of 32GB), is it going to convert it to a fixed-size 32GB drive?
 
unfortunately I just realized don't even have enough free space to convert it to a fixed-size drive because it's so big (32GB)
 
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