Vista - Disk space problem

I have WinXP SP2 installed on a Virtual PC 2007 virtual machine.

On C: (primary partition; basic) I have 605 Mb free disk space which is not
sufficient for (amongst other things), to install SP3.

I've tried:
1. Adding another virtual volume through Virtual PC, however, within Disk
Management (Start > Control Panel > Computer Management > Disk Management),
the option for spanned disk was disabled, when converting the new disk
(dynamic disk) I had just added. Any idea why? So this was unsuccessful and I
tried solution
2... 2. Adding the new disk, however, instead of assigning it a new drive
letter, I mounted the volume within c:\disk02. SP 3 installation program is
still complaining about low disk space. Disk space displayed within C: (right
click on the hard disk > Properties > Checking out the free disk space), now
shows as 268 Mb, which is low.

Any ideas how to:

1. add disk space so it appears as additional disk space within C: ?
2. hack my way around so I can install SP3 ?


Jon

On Sun, 30 Nov 2008 01:04:02 -0800, Jon
<Jon@xxxxxx> wrote:
Is this the specs for the disk *inside* the guest????
What do you mean by this?
If the *virtual disk* is too small (what is the size of the disk?) to
hold the data then you are in exactly the same situation as if you had
a physical hard drive you have outgrown!
You need to get yourself a new bigger drive and transfer the system
into that using a disk imaging program. I would do the following:

- Use VPC2007 Virtual Disk Wizard to create a new *dynamically
expanding* virtual disk of sufficient size (max is 130 Gb). It will
start out very small (35 kb) *.VHD file on your host system, but you
need to put it on a host drive with sufficient free space to grow to
the expected data size in your guest.

- Shut down your guest completely and commit any undo disk contents.

- Then in the properties of the guest add the newly created virtual
disk as disk #2.

- Then start the guest again

- Go to disk manager inside the guest and initialize the new drive.

- Then inside the guest go to Acronis webpage and download the trial
of Aconis Workstation. Install it in the guest.

- Start Acronis and use it to clone the existing C drive to the new
secondary drive. You need to select this function from the menu, none
of the shortcuts on the form are what you want.

- Then Acronis will reboot your guest and you will get to its transfer
page where the actual transfer will be done.

- After this you shut down the guest completely again and go into the
guest settings in the VPC2007 console.
Here you change the hard disk assignments by pointing disk 1 to the
new drive and setting disk 2 to none. This decouples your old drive
from the guest operating system.

- Then restart your guest. It will now have a new bigger drive and you
can do whatever you planned to do.

- Uninstall the Acronis trial, because it is no longer needed and it
will only last for 15 days anyway.


--

Bo Berglund (Sweden)