Ready, Aye, Ready

When I first started using Parallels, the idea was that I would use it on the MacBook for work and keep the OSX side completely clear for my personal use. Under the requirements at that time, I could happily get away with an 8 GB XP virtual hard drive with a second one dedicated for a RAW database partition. With the relatively small hard drive in the MacBook, that seemed to be a good compromise. However, changes in work requirements resulted in a need for a rather larger XP partition. For the last month I've been running with about 200 MB or less free on the XP partition which has resulted in relatively poor performance as the virtual machine pages in and out of virtual memory.

So began the quest to make the XP partition a bit larger without reformatting and reinstalling the operating system and all of its contents. The resize is pretty easy as Parallels comes with a tool that allows an easy increase in size of a virtual hard drive. However, there's still a requirement to resize the Windows partition. As usual, the internet came to the rescue with the below instructions on how to do it. I make no claims to have written this, only that it works. There's also an alternative way of doing this using GPartEd and a LiveCD in the form of an ISO image.

1. Copy the HDD drive image file and rename
2. Use Image Tools to resize the original HDD file
3. Change your VM profile to boot off of the copied HDD image and add the original, resized image as a second hard disk
4. Once booted, open CMD prompt and run DISKPART
5. View volumes in DISKPART with the command list volume. Note which volume is your original, resized partition
6. Select that partition using the DISKPART command select volume # where # is the partition number.
7. Enter the command extend
8. Enter the command exit
9. Exit Windows and change the VM profile to once again boot from the original, resized image file. You can disconnect (and delete?) the copied image file from the VM profile.