I've read all the threads on here that I can find and nothing seems to be exactly addressing my issue - or at least it isn't in terms that I'm understanding. I have a MBP with an 80gb drive. I created a VM with a plain disk that was half the harddrive (37gb) thinking "half for XP, half for OS X". However, I eventually consolidated a lot and moved XP's My Documents folder and a number of other large folders into shared Parallels folders, effectively bringing my XP partition from 20gb to about 3gb. What I've done so far: - Converted my 37gb plain hdd file to a 3gb expanded hdd file. - Compressed it - the "Actual Size" in the advanced tab of the VM config is right, Finder reports it right. - I figured that when I would convert the hdd file BACK to plain from expanded, I would be asked how big I wanted to make the plain drive.... not the case. It converted it back to a 37gb file. - Tried increasing the size of the 3gb file to 10gb, thinking I could then convert that, however it thinks the drive size is still 37gb and says I can only increase from there on. I have my original 37gb plain hdd file and my new 3gb expanded hdd file... what I want is a 10gb plain file. Any ideas are greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance, C. Marcera
Personally, I'd go with the 3 GB expanding file unless I had a really compelling reason not to (which I can't think of at the moment). But if you want to shrink the file, you are probably going to have to create a file the size you want, and copy the partition to it in Windows. I'm sure there's software out there to do this, but I haven't needed it so I can't steer you to it.
I wanted to stick with a plain file for the supposed performance increase over expanded - it's the same theory as setting a static max and min for your page file in windows - no resizing == less overhead. Anyway, for anyone else who cares, here's how I finally managed to accomplish this: - I created a new Plain drive file that was 10240mb (10gb). - Booted into my XP VM with the new drive file added so I could initialize, format, and set it as active. - Using an iso of the GParted CD, I booted off that with the 37gb drive mounted and changed the partition information to be a 10240mb (10gb) drive with ~17gb of unused space (This was done earlier, but I assume a necessary step). - Created a new VM that booted off a CD image: SystemRescueCD - then added my old 37gb expanded drive image AFTER I compressed it to 3gb. - Backed up the 3gb of data to a server using the 'partimage' application. - Restarted the VM but removed the old drive and mounted the new blank 10gb plain drive image. - Restored my backed up image from the server to the new drive, then restored the boot loader from the MBR to the new drive. Once that was done I started my winxp VM with the plain 10gb hdd file and viola, it worked Probably a bit over-complicated - I think GParted is on the SystemRescueCD as well and I'm not sure what steps might be optional, but this is how I was able to change/shrink my 37gb Plain file Partition into a 10gb Plain file partition.
In the partimage application on the SystemRescueCD, you can choose to restore the MBR, boot loader, or... another options that escapes me at the moment, when you choose your image file to restore. The image file contains the MBR data within it, I assume.
