Expanding Disk won't .... er, expand

L

ltf3

Junior Member
HI

I have a very well behaved Win XP sp2 running under Parallels 2.5 build 3186.0. on a Macbook Pro with OS 10.4.9. with 30GIG of available drive space.

The VM drive is set to be expanding and is currently about 8 GIG.

However I just attempted to play a movie directly from Netflix using their WinXP player in IE7 and the machine reports that there isn't enough disk space to download the movie.

The drive itself thinks there's only 350Meg left in the properties .... but shouldn't it expand as needed?

Any way to force it to?

Thanks in advance!

Lee
 
ltf3 said:
HI

I have a very well behaved Win XP sp2 running under Parallels 2.5 build 3186.0. on a Macbook Pro with OS 10.4.9. with 30GIG of available drive space.

The VM drive is set to be expanding and is currently about 8 GIG.

However I just attempted to play a movie directly from Netflix using their WinXP player in IE7 and the machine reports that there isn't enough disk space to download the movie.

The drive itself thinks there's only 350Meg left in the properties .... but shouldn't it expand as needed?

Any way to force it to?

Thanks in advance!

Lee
Click to expand...

Lee, I've not expanded mine for a while (VM is now at 30 GB on a 120 GB drive) but have done so twice. It seems I had to use a WinXp tool (Partition Magic) to resize WinXP partition after increasing the drive size. But I don't know if I used auto expand or did it manually.

Phil
 
ltf3 said:
The drive itself thinks there's only 350Meg left in the properties .... but shouldn't it expand as needed?
Click to expand...

I have a similar setup. Where are you seeing that there is only 350 MB left? (Sorry for my Windows ignorance--I just don't know where to look.)

David
 
David5000 said:
I have a similar setup. Where are you seeing that there is only 350 MB left? (Sorry for my Windows ignorance--I just don't know where to look.)

David
Click to expand...

My Computer in Win gives disk info.

Phil
 
David5000 said:
I have a similar setup. Where are you seeing that there is only 350 MB left? (Sorry for my Windows ignorance--I just don't know where to look.)

David
Click to expand...

In My Compter, right click on a drive and select properties. You should see a little pie chart.

Does your drive expand as needed?

Maybe it won't expand for temp/buffer type stuff?

Lee
 
ltf3 said:
In My Compter, right click on a drive and select properties. You should see a little pie chart.

Does your drive expand as needed?
Click to expand...

Thanks--I figured out where to look after I posted my question. For what it's worth, my disk has 3.54 GB used space, 4.25 GB free space (capacity 7.79 GB).

As far as I know it expands as needed. Until your post I didn't realize there could be a problem.

Have you tried disk cleanup, defragmenting and compressing?

David
 
'expanding' disks do not work this way.

An 'expanding' disk in Parallels is a disk that 'expands' the file that is the disk in MacOS so that you can save some disk space on the real hard drive.

As far as the VM is concerned, the disk has a fixed max size, just like a real drive does. Expanding disks do not 'expand' from the point of view of the Guest OS. FAT32 and NTFS assumes (and most other partition types also) that the size of a disk will not change while it is running because real hardware can't change its size. Because of this assumption, you can't change the size of a partition while Windows is running.

Parallels could eventually re-write all of Partition Magic to make their disks resize themselves from the point of view of the guest os, but that will take time.

For now: 'expanding' refers to the Host OS... not the Guest OS (windows)
 
Last edited:
Thanks unnamed!

unused_user_name said:
'expanding' disks do not work this way.


As far as the VM is concerned, the disk has a fixed max size, just like a real drive does.
Click to expand...


How right you are ... the docs say "The file that stores an image of expanding disk is small initially and grows as you add applications and data to the virtual disk. , while the The size specified when the
disk is created is the disk capacitydisk image file has a smaller size
most of the time."

My mistake ... read it but took away the wrong message!

Thanks

Lee
 
How to expand VM disk without destroying its content?

With respect to Parallels for MAC, is there a way to expand a too-small (8Gb) hard drive without destroying the contents? Is there a tool built into Parallels to do this? I see references in the forum to something called Partition Magic, but I'm not familiar with it.
 
I too have been looking for a way to do this under Parallels 5, I keep finding threads that get to the point that PTBALDWIN did, then never go any further, IS there a procedure to do this?
And if so, can someone please post it??
 
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