compressing to gain space

I have a MACBOOK almost entirely maxed out in space. 219MB free total.

Most of the space is in Parallels so I am attempting to reduce the size. I tried the compress option and got the following error:

The virtual hard disk /Users/jeff/Documents/Parallels/Microsoft Windows XP/winxp.hdd cannot be compacted

To compact the disk make sure that the virtual machine has the Undo disks option disabled and the disk is not connected to a virtual machine with snapshots. Plain disks cannot be compacted."

I found a "solution" somewhere else that told me to do this:

1. Close Parallels.
2. Go to the Parallels application folder and launch the Image Tool.
3. Select your Guest OS hard disk (.hdd) file.
4. Choose to Merge Snapshots on this .hdd, no other changes. This will take a long time.
5. Once it's done, go to your Parallels folder and delete any snapshot files, including the .xml or any snapshots folder.
6. Start Parallels. Under Actions, choose Run Parallels Compressor and follow the prompts.

Merge snapshots has now been running for about 19 hours. At least the last 6 hours (my awake time), it has been visually at the same place in the progress bar when it says "Processing the File" . The processing bar is almost entirely complete except for a tiny little bit at the end. At minimum, the process is using a ton of CPU right now.


Do I let this run forever? Is the progress bar just misleading? Is this some infinite loop? What happens at this point if I kill it? Do I trash something important?

Need thoughts...

Jeff

 

You need to free up Mac OS disk , move some files to external disk

 

What do you want me to do after that? Do I KILL and restart the merge snapshots already running or will it speed up/finish some point after that?

Jeff

 

Wait, if you kill, some data may be mixed, just clean as much space as possible from Mac OS