Just a tip that I found useful.
When I first purchased Parallels Workstation (back when it was beta), I setup my VM Windows XP installation and I decided (unwisely) that I needed a very small virtual disk drive because I didn’t want to waste space on my MacBook. I didn’t realize that the virtual drive doesn’t take up the entire space, but expands up to that limit. Consequently, I set my drive to 8 Gb. This has proved a bit problematic from time to time.
In the latest update of Parallels they re-supplied they re-supplied the Parallels Image Tool (which had been removed earlier.) This tool allows you to expand the virtual HD.
What it doesn’t do is expand the virtual C: drive, all it does is provide unallocated space. Using Windows alone, this means all you can do is either reformat, or create a second drive. Neither option was appealing. On a “real†hard drive, I’d grab a partitioning to and expand the drive, but I was not so sure that’s a good idea on a virtual drive.
To make a short story long, I decided to grab gparted, a linux-based tool available for download. gparted comes as a bootable ISO image. I made a couple changes to my VM configuration – telling it to boot to the “CD-rom†first and also telling it to treat the gparted ISO image as the drive.
It worked flawlessly. Linux booted, and gparted expanded my NTFS volume without a single glitch. Very cool.