Hello. I've been running the Parallels Virtual Machine on my MacBook Air for about 2 years now and everything has been fine until recently. I only have the 120GB hard drive and it seems like 64GB was allocated to the VM which is fine but I started to run out of space and the MAc kept telling me I needed to clear up space. I did delete some documents and temporary files and moved a lot to an external hard drive which cleared up some space but then I decided I would move the VM to the external hard drive as well so I could get that 64GB back. Is that how it works? That is how I thought it would work but it didn't. To move the VM, I located the pvm file and copied it over to my external hard drive which took about 45 minutes, but once it was done I moved the pvm file that was still on the Mac to the trash can and then I immediately emptied the trash. To my surprise, this did not clear up an of my hard drive space. I still only had a couple of GB available. Any ideas on why? It almost seems as though the file is still hidden somewhere and still using up my GB. I know for sure it is moved to the external because if I try to open Parallels while the external hard drive is not plugged in, it will not allow me. I've ran Disk Utility X and Omni Disk Sweeper and both only show about 50 or so GB used which would be correct if I still had some allocated to he VM. Where is the other 60GB though? Hiding somewhere? Any help is greatly appreciated!! Thanks.
Use this tool to identify how the space is being used: http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/ Also, is this a Bootcamp based Windows installation? If it is it's not easily transferable to an external drive.
Thanks for your reply. I've done that too. I've attached the screen shot that shows I have 61 GB of misc used space. What is that? No, it is not Bootcamp based.
I have no idea what it is occupying the large area, how could I know? But you can hover/click over the large areas and see the path on the status bar at the bottom.
