Want to change from plain disk to expanding disk

[bmwmcrider]

I am currently using the plain disk format for my VM WinXP guest OS. After using Parallels for about a year my total disk usage has stabilized to about 16 gBytes over the past few months. I would like to switch to the expanding disk format so that I can recover some space on my MacBook Pro hard drive but don't want to go through the bother of creating a new VM with WinXP as it guest OS and reinstalling all the Win apps that I am currently using.

I would like to know if there is any way of cloning my existing VM with the plain disk format into a new VM but with the expanding disk format?

Thanks,

Mike

 

[John@Parallels]

Use Parallels Image Tools from Applications/Parallels

 

[bmwmcrider]

John - thanks for the reply. In my post I neglected to mentioned that I did use the image tool; I ran the tool with the split hard disk image file option selected. At the conclusion of the process and the follow-up compacting process the image file was reduced. However, the resulting file, as viewed from the Mac side, was approximately 30 gBytes; yet the .hdd file size in the VM side is approximately 16 gBytes. I would have thought I would get a greater reduction in file size. In short I am perplexed.

Mike

 

[John@Parallels]

Please past screenshot for Disk Management in Windows

 

[bmwmcrider]

Please click one of the Quick Reply icons in the posts above to activate Quick Reply.

 

[bmwmcrider]

John - here is a screen shot of the hard drive using the disk management tool: http://screencast.com/t/AGkcawSnPb ; also here is a screen shot of the winxp.hpp structure: http://screencast.com/t/13sXMrSMJ . As you can see I have approx 18 gBytes of unused space on the guest OS hard drive of which some of it I would like to recover. Can I use a partitioning tool to accomplish this?

Mike

 

[John@Parallels]

Use Parallels Image tool and increase disk size on 100MB, then try to compact again