Major issue when reclaiming disk space

B

Brett_Conlon

Member
After re-booting my Win 7 virtual (Parallels 14) this morning I received a friendly message that I can reclaim 23GB of unused disc space - which is something I need. So I shut down windows, as requested, and started the reclaim process. The progress bar jumped to a quarter of the way through in the first few seconds (fantastic) then it just sat there. I think it may have moved a few millimetres more over the next 2 hours (groan) but I just couldn't wait any longer, being at work and had to stop it. There's no cancel button so all I could do was press the red close window button - which did close the window. The mac seemed super slow so I rebooted it but the Mac wouldn't shut down. I had to force it to shut down.

After the reboot I tried to launch Parallels but it sat there with "Starting..." for aaaages. I assumed that perhaps it was still trying to finish the reclaim task before my virtual became available.

But again, after a few more hours of waiting I now can't even use my Mac. Activity Monitor is showing that the CPU and memory usage is low but the hard drive is consistently doing 40MB/s reads (nothing is running). What's going on?????

Has Parallels started a Mac-side process that can't be stopped until it has finished, even after a reboot? Should this process have completed faster and if it is likely to be a long process, there should be a warning! Why is there not a cancel button with the progress bar?

It's completely killed my day (and hopefully not my Mac)!!!

Please help...

Regards, Brett
 
Hi Maria. I have good and bad news. After about another 4 hours of drive thrashing I finally got control of my Mac back (thank heavens). The bad news is that when I tried to boot up my Win7 virtual it's stuck on "Starting..." again and the drive Read thrashing is back (@ circa 40MB/s). Looks like I'm back at square-1.

I've sent the report and the ID is 299824048

Regards, Brett
 
It's now 7am here and Activity Monitor is showing it has read 435GB. I have 808GB used on my 1TB SSD so if it's going to process through the rest of my drive I still have a number of hours remaining. My Virtual still shows "Starting...". Looks like I've got another non-productive day ahead of me. Not good timing!!!!!!
 
It's now approaching 11am and Activity Monitor's data Read is at 768GB. I assume it will complete when it reaches my total used space of 808GB (at least I hope so) and hopefully my virtual will open up as if nothing happened...
 
Damn, it's now after 1pm. Parallels is still showing "Starting..." and Act Mon is up to 1.02TB total read. The drive capacity is only 1T so what the...?
I still can't get into my Virtual!!!

Support, any suggestions???????
 
4:30 now and it's up to 1.37TB of drive reads and it doesn't look like it's stopping. I think I'm now completely out of options.

Support, I need your help to get this fixed over the weekend so I'm ready for work on Monday. Please help!
 
Ok new problem. I finally manages to run the update (had to manually download it and run it).

Now when I launched my Virtual I'm getting a boot manager error that Windows won't start. Sadly my windows disc is at work so I don't have my product key to be able to run the repair. Won't be there until Mon morn.

Any other suggestions? Look like it roasted my Windows!
 

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Greetings Brett,
This sounds familiar.
Please see this forum discussion I started months ago:
"Mac host file system corruption during shrinking of PD13 Win10 VM".
It's PD14 now. Upgrading did not help.
Are you running your Mac on APFS (Apple File System)? We users suffering from this feel there is a serious bug with reclaiming disk space and APFS. Run the Mac disk doctor to check your file system. It may be corrupted. I know there has just been a PD14 patch released but there are no release notes. Maybe they fixed it but I'm afraid to try.
 
Hi RHS, thanks for your input. Yes, I'm running AFPS. I ran disk doctor and yes there are a few errors but Disk Util said it couldn't repair them. I might have to boot off an external drive and try again.

I did make some tiny progress though. When I got to work I connected my external DVD drive, inserted the Win7 install disc but for the life of me I couldn't get Windows to boot off it. I checked and changed the Parallels Config to make sure the Drive was on the Windows side (not Mac) and changed the boot order but nothing was working. Even tried another ext DVD drive (Dell). In the end I used Disk Utility to make a .dmg of the Win7 disc on my desktop then set the CD/DVD config to look at that image when booting and finally have booted off the Win disc. I'm running repairs now.
 
I wonder what this latest mysterious patch was that had no release notes. Perhaps a fix? I'm afraid to try.
 
Sadly Windows restore failed + Disk First Aid failed to repair some invalid fsroot tree stream errors even after booting off an external drive.
My last resort is to try downloading some proper Mac repair utilities (I used to use DiskWarrior back in the day) and try repair the Mac drive then try the Windows repair again.
 
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Wow, really, still no response from Parallels Support??? I have a competely hosed Windows partition and I've been down since Thursday, causing major impact on my work!
 
So I can assume Parallels support has given up on helping me?! ☹️

I have resolved that I'll never get back into my VM so to get me back up and running, I retrieved my VM backup from mid-December and have rebuilt my mail etc. I've lost some things saved to my desktop but nothing critical, from memory.

I've been saved by storing all of my working files on the Mac-side and sharing that with my Windows VM. I'd be far more in trouble if ALL my files were in the VM.

My task this weekend will be to clone everything off my 1T SSD and re-format it so I can hopefully clear the directory issue.

Sadly, this has blown my confidence in Parallels's support quality!
 
I'm very sorry to hear this. I don't use my VM all that much. It's only cost me downtime. It takes 2.5 hours to back up the entire machine, then around 12 hours watching it spin and spin, then a day recovering everything from Time Machine. I still think it's a bug between Parallels and the Mac's "free" space. There is free space and "purgeable" space. I think Parallels thinks that purgeable space is free when it isn't. I could be wrong. "Maria" wanted one of us to reproduce the issue. Yeah right. I'm going to destroy (again) everything and be down for 2 days. There's nothing to reproduce. Doesn't Parallels have some test machines for this?
 
Just wondering if the issue was ever resolved. I too am having major problems and really need help and no one can seem to give me any answers. I'm not sure which way to turn but I really need my computer back!
 
LisaK1 said:
Just wondering if the issue was ever resolved. I too am having major problems and really need help and no one can seem to give me any answers. I'm not sure which way to turn but I really need my computer back!
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Hi, please provide us with the details of the issue.
 
Maria - there are other discussion threads about this issue in this forum. See these discussion threads:

"Mac host file system corruption during shrinking of PD13 Win10 VM"
"Disable Dangerous "Free Up Disk Space" message"
"During Reclaiming Mac fozen and now VM does not run"

It started way back in PD13, running on Mojave. I believe it continues to this day. I will assume that no one wants to test PD15 on Catalina because no one wants to destroy their Mac operating system...again. Reclaiming disk space from a variable VM file will hang the Mac host OS causing one to do a hard reboot. Upon reboot, the Mac file system as well as the VM itself are corrupted. The only fix I know if is a complete reinstall/restore of the Mac from Time Machine, and a restore of the VM from backup. This has been going on for a very long time.
 
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