Hello -- after giving up on Parallels Compressor working for me (it doesn't, and the "tech support" by e-mail has been useless), I came up with another way to save on hard disk space. I originally had a 30GB virtual drive running Windows XP Home Edition, but I was only using about 2GB of it (I migrated my files onto other virtual drives that I can flush out periodically and avoiding needing to use Compressor). Anyway, I created a blank, unformatted 5GB .hdd virtual drive file, formatted it as FAT32 (just like my original disk) and used GParted to copy my original 30GB partition (again, only using 2GB) to the 5GB drive. It copied just fine, a perfect dupe, it looked like. But it wouldn't launch Windows -- I got a "No device available" error. I tried running the XP Recovery Console and running fixmbr and fixboot but neither of those had any effect. So I tried using Transporter to migrate the new 5GB .hdd to a new .hdd file, and that _seemed_ to work, because now XP will start to start up, but it hangs on the blue "Windows XP" screen. I have backups of all of the files so I'm not worried about losing anything, but I'm just trying to figure out the best way to do this. Any advice? How can I copy the data from one .hdd file into another and still have it boot Windows? I'm using the latest version of Parallels 3.0, on a MacBook. Any thoughts? I'm trying what I know is an elaborate workaround but if I can get it to work I'll be pretty happy. Then again, I'm about _this close_ to just switching to VMWare anyway (after being a long-time and enthusiastic Parallels supporter!!) because of the lack of things working correctly (specifically Compressor), and the lack of any real tech support (for $80 a pop I ought to get more than one e-mail telling me to defrag, which I had already done three times).
