Unable to Compress / Compact virtual hard disk

Dear all,

Compressing time depends on the state of the files stored on your virtual hard disk. Parallels Compressor has to read and check every block of the drive because it is unknown what's there inside.

We do understand that Compressor performance in these cases above is unacceptable and will work on optimizing its behavior further. But it is also true that its a free utility supplied with Parallels Desktop and while we concetnrate our efforts on making our virtualization technology better, some supplemental utilities may take a bit more time to improve.

Best regards,
Xenos
 
Last edited:
Tried post #20...I can't even get past step 15. The progress bar has advanced to the end, but seems to hang in an endless loop. Activity monitor reports using 140%CPU, now approaching 120 minutes. Is this supposed to take this long? I fear the length of time it will take to compress. Suggestions?
 
"OK after testing this and much research I finally have a sulotion that I know works so here it is." It works to do WHAT? Compact an EXPANDING disk? This can be done in 5608 or likely even earlier versions since it is now 2008. Compact a PLAIN disk?
 
Just saw the procedure set out by Celtic Tech as I was asking about how to make a VM smaller.

Having done the procedure, I was not only successful but managed to reclaim about 14 Gb of hard drive space.

So thanks to all who contributed (quite a long time ago).

Best wishes, Brian
 
I followed all of this and everything went along fine until I the middle of step 23, the last big step. After running from 2:00 pm until past 10:30, sometime during the night the computer went to sleep. I think it just got hot (the fans were running full speed for hours) or just tired. LOL. So when I woke it from sleep it "resumed" being compacted, but the blue progress bar moves so slow I can't tell if anything is actually happening, same as yesterday. It has barely moved so maybe not moving forward at all?

So since it went to sleep do I have to start over? Isn't there a better way to reclaim hard disc space? Build 5608 installed on MBP running 10.5.2 and Windows XP with SP2. My goal is to free up space for Boot Camp so I can run a direct PC as Parallels is not working with one program I use on the PC side and the tech support says they don't support emulation programs.

CelticTech said:
OK after testing this and much research I finally have a sulotion that I know works so here it is.

First everyone upgrade to build 5160 you will need the image tool that comes with that build. next

To fix this Follow these steps


1. Open Parallels and start windows
2. go to the Actions menu and click on Create Snapshot
3. In the snapshot window just click the OK Button

4. Shut down windows using the shutdown feature in windows
5. Turn off Parallels

6. Go to Applications/Parallels and open Parallels Image Tool
7. Click Continue on the Introduction Page
8. Click Choose on the source image page.
9. Select your HDD
10. Click Continue

11. Select Manage disk Properties in the action screen, Click continue
12. In the Operations screen put a checkmark in the Merge snapshots item only. And click the Start button.
13. A warning Message will drop down, Click Yes
14. The Image tool will start to process your HDD this can take a long time be patient
15. When The process completes click finish

Next boot the VM:
It is normal for this to take a little longer than usual.

Finally Run Disc Compressor:

18. Go to Actions on the toolbar and select Run Parallels Copressor......
19. A dropdown menu will appear with a message on it click ok
20. A countdown will begin, allow it to start automatically
21. The Compressor will start the first set of operations this can take some time.
22. After the first operations have completed Click on the restart button
23. After the restart the next set of operations will start again this will take some time to complete. When the compression is completed the compacting of the disk will begin automatically. This can take hours to complete. Do not interrupt it, suspend your Mac or put it into sleep mode during this process.
24. When Compacting is completed click on the OK button.
25. Click Finish on the Compressor Window.

Clean Up
26. Go to the Macintosh HD/Users/your user name/documents/parallels/your virtual machine/ and delete the Snapshots folder and the Snapshots.xml
Click to expand...
 
Well another 6 hours and it appears to have moved another 10% up the bar. At least it's moving, but how is it possible that this process takes this many hours? At least you can still use the Mac OS side of the computer while it's compressing.
 
The first time I did this it took hours. I've done it several times since and it's usually done within a couple of hours. I've reclaimed so much space it's not funny.

After this procedure was done, it all worked properly with problems the next time around.
 
OK, we're up to 49 hours, looks like I'll beat the previous 50 hour record! My progress bar is up to about even with the "d" in "compacted" and since this morning has come all the way from the "m" so maybe by midnight tonight it will be complete! FWIW, apparently HD space is freed up along the way, as my free space has grown by about 10 GB already.
 
i have the "slow compacting issue aswell. my image is 50 gb with 20gb used. what troubles me most: i used a disk defragmenter in windows (jkdefrag, excellent tool), so that more than the second half of the image was no longer containing data, so a simple truncation of the image should be a breeze. what the first parallels compressor step does: it completely fragments the drive again, before starting that second, external step. wtf? the drive was nicely organized before.

then: after letting it run for 15 hours, and the progressbar sitting at 50%, my activity monitor still shows almost constant 50 Megabytes per second of disk writing, and almost NO disk reading activity, and totals to 200gb read, and 1.3 TB written to disk. seriously parallels, what are you DOING there? how can you write 1.2 tb of data to the harddisk without ever reading a similar amount? from a software developers point of view, this looks like a completely broken defragmenter. seriously.

f
 
The compressor finally did finish. Sorry should have posted earlier. But since it completed and freed up about 20 GB of HD space, Windows has reclaimed much of it. According to the Get Info the Capacity is 31.24 GB, 10.04 is used and 21.48 is available. Every time I boot XP, I get a message that I am low on virtual memory and that Windows is increasing the size again. So I don't know that it made any difference in the end.
 
Low Virtual memory is memory related problem, increase memory for VM, also this may be caused by memory leak for one of the software installed in VM
 
finally did it. i got my disk to compact / compress (why have two names?). though it took 56 hours and resulted in 6.08 TB of data being written - so my HDD is probably about to die. why so much writing of data? the original HDD image was 38 GB, the new one is 12.5 GB so i'm still on the fence as to if it was worth it. i wonder how long it takes to grow back to 38 GB...

data.png
 
This is not only Compacting operation, other software may perform disk operations too, Actually I suppose you do not have enough space on Mac HDD
 
John@Parallels said:
This is not only Compacting operation, other software may perform disk operations too, Actually I suppose you do not have enough space on Mac HDD
Click to expand...

that statement makes no sense.

1. the computer was left untouched except for parallels. okay sure background threads may write data here and there, but 99% of the data was written by parallels. before starting the compaction / compression (again why two names?) i restarted the computer so it was fresh data. parallels is writing a sh!tload of data. there's no point in denying it. just own up to it and accept it - i have.

2. the drive is a 500gb HDD and i never reported a problem with space. if you read my post it said it completed finally (after 56 hours) and i did note that the 38gb vm went down to 12gb.

i'm not sure why parallels is starting to just deny any problem and is so quick to blame the computer / hdd / user before doing any real investigation into the problem. it seems to be happening a lot more in the forums.

ok sorry if i pi$$ed anyone off but i'm getting tired of dealing with parallels constantly professing there are no problems when there are obviously issues.

my only questions were:

1. why are there two names for the operation? i understand there are two stages - cleaning up the hdd, then removing free space from the hdd image file. just confusing.

2. why does it have to write so much data? it's writing the virtual hdd over 150 times. surely there is a more efficient way to perform this work.
 
Post #18 in this thread worked for me

I have been having problems with compacting my virtual disk (Compressor said I had snapshots ) and have tried many of the solutions in this thread.

The only one that worked was post #18 in this thread by cbell

The only gotcha is that you have to have enough disk space on your computer drive to recreate the original size of your virtual drive

My virtual disk had grown to 15.5 GB from the original size of 8 GB. I followed his procedure and now my drive is back to 8 GB.

When I first tried to boot off of the new drive I created is wouldn't work ( I had removed the original drive from the configuration).

I then added the original drive back in and rebooted. It recognized the new drive as a secondary drive.

I did a shutdown and then went to Advanced under the new drive and set the Connect to: IDE 0:0 (said yes to allow it to flip from the existing drive).

After it booted off the new drive, I shutdown, remove the original drive from the config and then deleted the virtual image (.hdd) from my file system gaining an additional 8 GBs of file space
 
Screwed again

Needed to compress. Was told to remove all snapshots. Did it. Then cloned the VM. After that Compressed the original VM. Neither the compressed or cloned VM will run now. They fail on boot up. Running Safe mode the load stops at Mup.sys.

NOW WHAT! I got this Mac to make my life easier and I have battled this Parallels software since the day I installed it. Can someone help me get my computer running again.

Thanks for any help.

Bob
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top