Disk Image Resizing Problem

Last night I enlarged an XP Disk Image file using the Image Utility on an XP machine (actually on the same iMac 20" running Boot Camp). Now, the Parallels main screen shows the size as 20 GB but, when I go into Windows and check the properties, drive C: is still showing as 4 GB with only 200 MB of space left.

Here are a couple of screen shots for reference:




Any ideas? I need to install some software that will take up more than 200 MB.

Thanks,
Tom

 

You probably told it to create an expanding hard drive, which means it will expand up to the max size you specified as necessary. This is actually a good thing.

 

Thanks for the quick reply.

I don't recall doing that during the initial setup. If what you say is correct then shouldn't the Windows properties show as 20 GB but the actual Mac file size would be less?

TomT

 

To see other space you need to resize your partition inside VM, or create a new partition.

 

Could you possibly be more specific in what I should do? I believe that I followed the instructions correctly and you can see in picture 1 above that the VM sees the disk as 20 GB. I'm not sure where to go at this point.

Thanks,

TomT

 

It does create expanding drives by default.

But yes, in windows you should see the actual size of the hard drive that windows thinks it is (as though it was using up the entire space you allocated).

For example, I set a roughly 80 GB parition for my windows VM, and I see Free Space: 76.1 GB and Total Size: 78.1 GB.

I'm not sure what the instructions above are about resizing the partition in VM, I never did that, all I did was tell Parallels what size disk I wanted for XP, and it did it. And windows sees it as ~80 GB, so...

 

Problem XP at this point

I tried the same thing. Parallels has sctually done its job but att his point XP now has to increase the drive.

If you go into disk manager you should now see an area of unpartioned space.

The trick is how to increase the size of the c drive. I tried conversted the C drive to a dynamic disk which it did. I then tried to add the unpartioned space to the C drive but I got an error that since this was a startup disk I was unable to add space to the drive.


Any XP experts have any ideas ?

 

You can't modify the boot partition using XP itself, but if you're seeing unpartitioned free space, can you create a new partition in the VM?

This would appear as a new D: drive in your My Computer.

 

You can modify even existing partitions using special tools like Partition Magic.

 

Ok, I think I see where I am going wrong here. I assumed that the Parallels Image Utility would also increase the Windows Partition right along with the Drive Size. Obviously this is not the case.

I'll look into Partition Magic to try and enlarge the partition.

Thanks for all of your help.

TomT

 

There is a freeware tool called presizer that will add unused space to a partition. It's a DOS program that you put on a floppy image so that you can boot from the floppy (freeing up the .hdd image) and then update the partition to add any contiguous free space.

I use this in conjunction with g4u to increase the size of .hdd drive images. I posted that process in another thread.