Yesterday a client called and asked for help concerning here Macbook Air running out of disc space (newest type, with 128GB of SSD). She uses Parallels 7 (incl. all updates). The only VM used is configured with Windows 7, expanding disk 64GB. Since the VM-file was almost 64GB in size, I advised here to make the reserved space a bit smaller (resize option on HHD-tab). It took about 30 seconds to adjust the size to 50Gb (only 32Gb was in use). Strange thing was, the extra space didn't show up, on the Mac HD (there was about 5GB free, I thought it would grow to about 19Gb). After that I pressed the "Compress..." button (on the same property-page). A message saying it would free up about 50GB sounded almost to good to be true, but after pressing this button, almost immediately, the Mac HD showed about 55GB's of free space! For a short moment I was happy, but now the VM-file is only 3,5GB and doesn't work anymore! Starting it up show's the boot screen with the message 'missing operating system'! Total Pannic! This client had alot of very important data in this image. She had a backup from a few files, moslty 2 weeks old, but surely not all.. I really don't understand a resize/compress action can completely destroy you're installation, leaving an unusable file. If that's really the case, the name of the button would better be 'destroy my VM'. I still do have the VM-file (3,5Gb) but can't do anything with it. I cannot start it and cannot mount it with Parallels mounter. Showing the packet-content show's a few files but the big one (a .hds file) cannot be opened, mounted or viewed in any way. Is there any repair option or tool, or a way to see what's left of files in the 3.5Gb file?? I really didn't expect a professional product like Parallels Desktop can, without any warning, completely destroy your'e work, just by pressing a 'compress' button. Any kind of help is welcome...
wow.. sounds like a disaster.. I am afraid to suppose that something went wrong and the vm is destroyed now. We would like to get problem report from the help menu to investigate and prevent it. Meanwhile there is an option to take a look if anything is still there on compressed disk. take a look here http://kb.parallels.com/en/112869 step No 4
