Parallels Desktop for Mac

[T22S]

I am running Parallels Desktop for Mac on my Macbook Pro laptop, with Windows XP Professional as the operating system.
I have recently received a message that the virtual pc's virtual hard drive is full when trying to install another programme. When checking I found that it has been created with only 8GB as the disk size. I have used the Parallels Image Tool to increase the capacity of the virtual hard drive to 32GB. Although it has increased the size of the virtual hard drive, it has created the additional space as a separate partition, which I can only access by giving it another Drive name, e.g. E.

Does anyone know if there is a way of incorporating this additional capacity into the original C drive partition (without loosing information and installed software on the C drive) so that I do not have to have two separate virtual drives?

Regards

 

[Foamcow]

I don't think you can change 'on the fly' but when setting up you can specify that the windows partition be either "plain" or "expanding".

Plain is a fixed size, which sounds like what you have.

Expanding will let the partition 'grow' to a specified maximum size as you need it. So say you specify 32Gb as the max, the initial install may only take up a portion of that. This saves space on the 'real' hard disk.

As I said, I don't think you can change from one to the other once the partition has been created.

You can create another, secondary, Windows volume though, sort of a second drive, that can be used by the Windows installation.

Bring up your virtual machine's settings panel.
Click "Add", choose "Hard Disk" and set it up as an Expanding volume.
Next, fire up Windows, go to Start->Control Panels->Adminitrative Tools and navigate to the Disk Management panel. You should see your main volume there and your new volume.
The new volume needs to be initialised and a partition created on it.


Your Windows installation should now have another volume available to play with but the space won't be used until it's needed.

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[T22S]

Thanks for help. Will I also need to reinstall some software onto the new drive/partition to free up space on the virtual C drive for ongoing updates to the operating system as it is currently full, or will all future Windows updates automatically be saved onto the new drive?

Regards,

 

[Foamcow]

No.
The extra drive will simply be storage space. Your operating system will still be on the first drive. All updates will be applied there.
You should be able to install and run applications on the extra drive though.

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[T22S]

Many thanks again for your help. Much appreciated.

Regards,