verification of hosed vm? (a critical error has occurred while reading/writing to hard disk)

first of all, navigating through this site to post something is awful. i guess it's residual anger in my current situation with parallels / vm

the other day, when i tried to start my vm, i got a message saying it could possibly free up so much free space. i did that and of course, it hung for hours and then caused a kernel panic on my mac. great

i now get the great "a critical error has occurred while reading/writing to hard disk 0 use by "windows 10".

i visited the site: https://kb.parallels.com/en/120940 performed the steps (no errors). stopped at running a vm from an external drive

if there is anything else can be done..please let me know. my vm is NOT backed up via time machine (it would just slow it down too much).