Moving C: Drive for WinXP

I installed a 1TB mirror on my Mac as STOR02. I used the user admin advanced settings to change my home directory to /Volumes/STOR02/user/dleepenn. I had previously copied my whole /user/dleepen folder over to the STOR02 volume and had restarted the Mac.

When I checked, my personal home directory is now properly located on STOR02.

BUT... The WINXP virtual machine that I setup before I moved this data still wants to see everything in the original folder. After dragging what I thought was a now useless /user/dleepenn folder off to the trashcan, Parallels complained that it could not find the hard drive images.

I did go into the Parallels Admin menu and told it to look in /Volumes/STOR02/user/lee/documents for its files, but it would seem that Parallels is not about to let me do this.

I'm early in this process and am thinking it might be just as easy to remove my WINXP virtual machine AND blow away Parallels and start from scratch again.

Suggestions????

Lee

 

In your VM Configuration Editor change the Hard Disk image file location to the new location.

Note: a 'mirror' would be a replicate of the original drive or part of it but the original drive would still be there with the same contents, and the 'mirror' mirroring it.

 

I have a bit more info for my mystery. Under my parallels directory in ~/documents/parallels, I have a path:
./WINXP/Windows Disks/ and in this folder is an alias called C that points to

/private/tmp/312/C but I cannot seem to actually find where this file is stored. Pulling up additional info shows me this is a VOLUME, but I think its an actual file which is stored somewhere on my system and I cannot find its REAL location.

I'm running multiple hard drives on my system. My primary is the standard 320G that comes with the MacPro and my second drive is a 2 drive mirror with seagate 1TB drives. My plan is to keep all variable data on the secondary mirrored array. Apple is making this difficult at the moment.

Lee

 

All it matters is the file that says .hdd unless you are running Boot Camp, which from the look of it seems to be true, and you should have said from the start you were running Boot Camp.

Try this article: http://kb.parallels.com/en/5063

If it's not Boot Camp then the .hdd file should be available in the .../WinXP/ directory. If it's not, you just lost your Windows installation.


Apple is not making anything difficult, the problem is that you have a certain expectation of how things should work and how to get there that is not based on actual knowledge of the platform, you implement your solution the way you think it should be and find yourself surprised that it doesn't work as you envisioned.

 

I'm not running boot camp. When I did the diskutil command, no microsoft data partition exists. It was useful to see the output of this command tho as I understand the Apple system a bit better now. I'm converting from MS WIN XP to Apple. But, I still need to run my WIN apps. Parallels is working well.

However... also checked the configuration editor and the .hdd file is located on my STOR02 volume which is my second drive. However... I'm still very puzzled by this C alias and why it shows up as a Volume. You would think that that would be a boot camp partition, but its not.

Still confused at this point. I want to find that 32 GIG disk image file..... I'm also wondering what happens when I need more than 32 G of space.

Thanks for the help... Lee

 

The disk image file is the .hdd file! Forget about the C: files, they are aliases they are only useful when the VM is running, they serve to mount the virtual harddisk as a volume on the mac and they point to temp directory that is only filled when the VM is running. All you need to do is point the Hard Disk 1 in Parallels configuration editor to the new place the .hdd is, the path should be similar to the previous one in every expect, except for the /Volume/STOR02... that should be added before the rest of the path.

 

Does this virtual drive automatically expand as you add data and programs to it? Or is the 32 Gig a hard limit???

Finally, I do think I understand. If I stop Parallels and open the hdd file, it is seen by the system as a hard drive.

I finally understand why the alias is there.... In unix, you put in empty directories and then mount things to them for access. That clarifies a great deal.

Now about that expansion of space past 32Gigs????

Lee

 

Use the Parallels Image Tool.app in /Applications/Parallels it will allow you to expand an existing virtual hard drive, this increases the size of the drive for the guest OS but the existing partitions in the virtual drive will not be changed, this means the new drive will have the added size as free space, inside the guest machine you'll have to expand the NTFS or FAT partition to use the new free space.