Cannot Compress Hard Drive

Mac OS X 10.6.7: Parallels 6.0.11994: VM Windows XP SP 3.

Try to compress hard drive in Parallel configurator. Compression starts, then stops and gives an error code that says "The disk is corrupt or has snapshots. Delete the snapshots and try again. If the problem persists, contact the Parallels support team for assistance." Undo Disks" is disabled; SmartGuard is disabled; tried to use the command "prl_disk_tool merge --hdd <hddname>.hdd" per Article ID: 9165. Seemed to work. Tried to compress again and got the error again.

I have not used snapshots and the snapshots folder seems to be empty.

Has anyone had a similar problem and found a solution?

 

disk compression error

Have you gotten this resolved. Have same problem and can't find solution on this forum. For such an active topic Parallels support really seems to suck!

 

I agree with you they don't reply immediately. We are having trouble here.

 

I'm also having this issue. Has anyone resolved this yet?

 

I have the exact same issue, this thread was started on April 11th and today is September 21st...

Seems to me like it shouldn't take more than 5 months to even get an inaction that it's being looked into... It almost felt like it took less time than that for them to release a paid upgrade to version 7 than its taking for them to start looking into this...

 

Knowledgebase article 9165

Bobby:

I found this while searching Parallels knowledgebase and it resolved my issues.

http://kb.parallels.com/en/9165

Good luck!

Tom.

 

As the first post in this thread indicates, I too had already tried this. The command appeared to work successfully without error but it did NOT prevent the same error from continuing to occur...

 

You did scan (within Windows) for actual "hard disk" problems, correct? One cause of this can be that when Parallels checks for problems prior to compressing the "hard disk" it finds them and rather than make matters worse it aborts the process.

 

I have done full verifications and testings on the VMs themselves... I have the same exact problem on both a Windows XP VM & a Windows 7 VM, nether of which seem to have any issues...

I've done enough searching on the forum to find out this problem actually dates back several versions, with post back at least as far as 2007 having the same issue, so whatever my specific issue is, its definitely not new or unique...

 

In that case you can wait for a reply here, or if you want a quicker answer/resolution I'd send a trouble ticket using the Parallels menu "Help" and selecting "Get Support" or you can "Report a Problem" which sends information about your Parallels setup. Either will give you a trouble ticket number (which you can even post here and sometimes they reply here in addition to directly to you).

Their response time is 3 working days, but I've had replies typically 1-2 days, and even been called to gather more information. This is a forum of uses helping users and they do monitor this but their first priority is replying to direct support requests.

Please let us know if/when they come up with a solution so that it can help other users with similar problems

 

Working solution for non compressable drives

Hi,

in case anyone is still looking for a solution, here's how to resolve the issue with un-compressable virtual hard drives using Windows XP (works most likely on any Windows version):

1) Make sure the following KB article doesn't resolve the issue: http://kb.parallels.com/en/9165
2) Configure the virtual machine to create a new hard drive with at least the size of the "problem" drive.
3) Boot up the virtual host and open 'Disk Management' to partition and format your new hard drive.
4) Download and install the free version of DriveImage XML: http://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm
5) Open DriveImage XML and do a 'Drive to Drive' clone from the old to the new drive (ignore locking problems).
6) After the cloning, open 'Disk Management' again and flag your new drive as active.
7) Shutdown the virtual host and uncheck your old drive in the configuration options and in the boot priorities, make sure the new drive is first in the boot priorities.
8) Start the virtual host again and test if the new disk is working, if yes you can delete the old disk.

=> The newly cloned disk should now be compressable again.

 

I completed all of the steps above, and the cloned disk was still uncompressable.