Hard Disk Settings

To view and configure the settings of a virtual disk, use the Hard Disk pane of the Virtual Machine Configuration dialog. Hard disk images have the .hdd format.

Connecting and disconnecting disks

Select the Connected option if you want the virtual machine to use this hard disk drive. To temporarily disable operations with the hard disk without removing it from the virtual machine configuration, clear the Connected check box.

Specifying the source file for disks

To use a hard disk image file as a virtual hard disk:

1. Choose the desired file from the Source menu, or click the Choose an image file link and navigate to the file.
2. In the Location list box, choose the disk interface type and location:
   • IDE . Using this interface type, you can connect up to four virtual devices (hard disks or CD/DVD-ROM drives) to the virtual machine.
   • SCSI . Using this interface type, you can connect up to 15 virtual devices to the virtual machine.
   • SATA . Using this interface type, you can connect up to 6 virtual devices to the virtual machine.

     Notes:

     1. SATA disks can be added to and removed from running and stopped virtual machines while operations on IDE and SCSI disks are allowed for stopped virtual machines only.

     2. The SCSI 7:0 location is not available for selecting, since it is occupied by the SCSI controller itself.

3. Click OK .

Resizing virtual hard disks

To reduce or increase the virtual hard disk size, use the Edit button. If you click this button, the Resize Hard Disk window is displayed.

To reduce the virtual hard disk size, you can do one of the following:

Note: Reducing dynamic disks is not supported.

• If the virtual hard disk image is blank, specify the new size and click OK .
• If the virtual hard disk already has a file system, specify the new size, select Resize file system , and click OK .

To increase the virtual hard disk size, you can do one of the following:

• If the virtual hard disk image is blank, specify the new size and click OK .
• If the virtual hard disk already has a file system, specify the new size and click OK . In this case, the added space will be unallocated. You will have to create a logical drive or a partition on the unallocated space and then format the newly created drive or partition.
• If the virtual hard disk already has a file system, specify the new size, select Resize file system , and click OK . In this case, you will not have to format the added space and it will be available to the existent drive.
• If the virtual hard disk is dynamic, specify the new size and click OK . You will have to format the newly added space manually.

Note: When increasing the dynamic virtual hard disk size, make sure the Resize file system option is not selected.

Compressing disks

If you use an expanding virtual hard disk in your virtual machine, its image file size on the physical hard disk increases as you add new data to the virtual disk. When you delete some data from this virtual hard disk, free unused space appears on the disk, but the amount of space the virtual machine occupies on the hard disk of the Parallels server does not reduce. To free the unused space on the physical server, click the Compress button.

Note: Compressing is available only for Windows- and Linux-based virtual machines that have Parallels Tools installed and does not have any snapshots.

When you finish configuring the hard disk settings, click OK to save the changes and quit the Virtual Machine Configuration dialog. If you do not want to save the changes, click Cancel .