APPLIES TO:

Symptoms

You are running out of free space in your Virtual Machine and want to increase the virtual hard disk size. 

Cause

Even if you have an Expanding virtual hard drive - it would not expand above the limit which is set in Virtual Hard Drive Configuration. You need to increase it manually in order to allow disk to expand further.

Resolution

Warning! We strongly recommend to check your Virtual Machine's hard disk for errors and back up your data before following the steps below.

In order to increase Virtual Hard Drive size, please go to Virtual Machine menu ► Configuration ► Hardware.
In Hardware tab, open Hard Disk 1 and click Edit. 

Please select the new size of the virtual machine. Check "Resize file system" and click Apply.



A progress bar will appear and then your virtual hard drive will be resized.

To make sure the changes were applied successfully please check:

• The size of the Virtual hard drive (Hard Disk 1)  was changed

• Start Windows, go to Start  ►  Control Panel  ► Administrative Tools   ► Computer management  ►  Disk Management

The size of the main partition (the partition Windows boots from; it is (C:) by default) should be equal to the size of the Virtual Hard Disk (Hard Disk 1)

• Go to Start  ►  Computer. Right-click on Local Disk (C:) and choose Properties. Check the size of the Local Disk (C:)  - it should be equal to the size of the Virtual Hard Disk and (C:)  partition in Disk Management (see above)

If the File system was not resized

NOTE: We strongly recommend to backup your Virtual machine before following the steps below.

If Resize File System option is greyed out for some reason or you cleared its checkbox or for some reason Windows did not accept the changes to the file system  you will notice that while the size of the Hard Disk 1 (Virtual hard disk) has successfully changed, the size of the Local Disk (C:) in Windows still remains unchanged.
The Disk Management reports you now have an extra partition on the hard drive which is marked as Unallocated:



You can manually add this Unallocated partition to your main (C:) partition:


1. Right-click on the main (C:) partition and choose Extend Volume from the list



2. Extend Volume Wizard will open. Click Next.



3. On the Select Disk page you may choose how much extra space should be added to the main (C:) partition. By default the whole Unallocated partition will be added. Click Next.



4. Click Finish on the next page and the Unallocated partition will be added to the (C:) partition.



5. Now go to Start  ► Computer to verify the Local Disk (C:) has accepted the changes you have just made and has been actually resized.




NOTE: If you have Parallels Desktop version 2 or 3, please use KB 5146 
             If you have any trouble resizing you hard disk, please refer to the KB 8004   
             For the list of supported filesystems please refer to the KB 113840