Ran out of space on Windows, need to bump it up on mac

OK, I've been struggling with this for a few days, so any help would be great. I'm running OS X 10.6.4 i have 2.4 GHZ intel core 2 duo, 4gb memory, it looks like i have 316.gb of space, and have used about half of that. I'm running windows XP professional.

Windows keeps popping up that I'm running out of space on disc c. so I shut it down, and goto configure. When I go into the configure menu, I go to hardware, and click on hard disc 1. After doing that, I try to resize, but I get the error "Unable to resize the disk because it has one or more snapshots. This disk belongs to a virtual machine that has one or more snapshots. Merge or delete these snapshots and try again."

When I go into manage snap shots, there is only one snap shot. I do have a few different virtual machine VPMs set up, due to an accident with the virtual machines list last month. I could probably delete one or more of them if need be.

So then, per other advice, I go into my applications and run parallels image tool. I start it up, and here is where I get stuck. it asks to "specify the path to your virtual hard disk image file" where I'm supposed to choose it. I cannot, for love or money, figure out where my virtual hard disk is for my machine. When I open finder, and look at my hard disk, I see nothing that blatantly jumps out at me to indicate it's my virtual hard disc. Trying to select anything through the applications parallels folder is not working. Trying to select anything in the shared parallels folder=nothing. In the users folder where the parallels vpms show up, nothing. Nothing under devices, and when I open admin computer, it only shows bootcamp, a networked drive, my mac HD, network, and time machine.

I cannot continue to work with the way my machine is set up, help please

 

getting worse

I tried removing the copies of those virtual machines, didn't work. I tried restoring them through time machine, and now I get that I don't have an OS installed on my machine. It won't let me resize the partition, becase the last partition on this hard disc cannot be resized.

When I try to boot from boot camp, nothing is happening. Please I need to get back and functioning.

 

Virtual machines are stored as .pvm files usually in ~/Documents/Parallels/. Virtual hard disks are stored in .hdd files usually inside the .pvm. Right click a .pvm file in the Finder and select Show Package contents. A .pvm file is a package, which means it's actually a folder containing other files. A .hdd file is also a package. Most Mac OS X apps are also packages. Another name for package is bundle.

You can run Parallels Image Tool.app, and navigate to inside your .pvm and select a .hdd to modify it. This probably has the same restrictions as using the Resize button in the VM Configure window for hard disks. The name of the .hdd is shown in the Configure window for hard disks.

You know about snap shots (Parallels Desktop help menu, type snapshots, select help for "Working With Snapshots", press the Next button to read all about snapshots). Did you try deleting the snapshot before resizing the hard disk? Did you shutdown Windows properly without pausing before trying to resize?

Anyway, before you can resize anything, you need to be able to get back into Windows (there's no point in resizing if your VM is broken). You say you have Windows on a Boot Camp partition. Is your Virtual Machine setup to boot Windows from a Boot Camp partition or from a virtual hard disk?

Boot Camp partitions cannot be resized by Parallels. Only virtual hard disks.

To resize a Boot Camp partition, you would need a partitioning utility like iPartition. First you would shrink your other partition, then grow the Boot Camp partition. The Boot Camp partition will be moved by the utility so it can be resized. Moving a partition takes a long time.

If your virtual machines are all broken, you could try recreating them all. The only thing you really need to keep from your old VM's are the virtual hard disk .hdd files so make sure when you delete a .pvm that there is no .hdd inside that you want to keep. You don't need to keep any .hdd files that point to a Boot Camp partition. .hdd files that point to a Boot Camp partition are under 100 KB in size. Virtual hard disk .hdd files are usually over 1 MB.

If you're having problems booting from your Boot Camp partition, make sure that the MBR and GPT partition tables are synchronized. Use Terminal.app to run the following commands and post the output here:

Code:

 diskutil list
sudo gpt -r show -l disk0
sudo fdisk /dev/rdisk0

 

Fixing the dreaded "Snapshots Exist" error and VM bloat

There is a way to fix the "cannot resize because snapshots exist" problem with VM's under Parallels Desktop for Mac. I'm guessing there is something wrong with the upgrading of existing VM's as the new Parallels versions come out and it results in this issue. This isn't a direct fix, but the following roundabout method seems to cure things well enough.

NOTE: This will only work if you have enough free space on the host disk to duplicate the *actual* size of the ailing VM (go into the VM and find its reported disk size).

In my test case, I had a 32gb Windows XP VM (which was full, and needed to be sized up) running under Parallels 6. This VM had been upgraded continually since Parallels 3. The .pvm file for this "32gb" vm was consuming over 100gb of disk space on the host disk. There were lots of extra ".hds" files in the disk image but deleting any of them would kill the image. It could not be resized due to the "snapshots exist" error (of course, there weren't any snapshots).

The copy process below required 32gb free space to create a new virtual machine, after which I deleted the old one and recovered 100gb space. On a mid-2010 MBP with i7 and Snow Leopard this process took about two hours to fully complete.

In Parallels 6:

1) Launch the VM that you want to refresh, and make sure its network settings are configured to "shared" and it can see the 'net. Download the version-appropriate Parallels Transporter to it (from the Parallels website).

2) In the VM, install Parallels Transporter and allow it to reboot if it wants to. Transporter will start up automatically. Don't close it. You shouldn't need to do anything else to it.

3) In Parallels on the Mac side, launch File|Import...

4) Follow the normal import procedure on the Mac side, using "network" transfer method. Make sure to select the configuration settings you prefer such as shared filesystem settings, Coherence settings, etc. These will not copy over from the old VM!

Parallels Import will auto-detect the Transporter running in your old VM over the shared network connection. It may ask for a name and password (this should be an admin-level account in the old VM). It should then display the old VM's IP number, you can verify it by looking at the Parallels Transporter window in the old VM. Select this and proceed to build a new VM from the old one. When asked for a VM name, pick something different from the one you are importing from.

The new VM will be your existing Guest OS image, but brand-new "underneath"...it will be the correct footprint size and the corruption that causes the "cannot resize because snapshots exist" error will not copy over. The bloat-causing "extra junk" also stays behind.

If you're using one of the Windows "Home" editions or something else that requires activation, you might have to re-activate it in the new VM. Road test the new copy thoroughly before trashing the old one!!