My supervisor has one of those tiny macbook air with 60GB hard drive. He ran out of space. He was running Windows XP virtual machine. He didn't need it anymore so I figured out how to delete the XP virtual machine and gained 17GB of space back. He mentioned he thought that a 30GB partition was created and the 17GB was gained, but an additional 13GB could be recaptured for storage. Is there a partition on his machine that is now being "unused" that could be captured back to his main storage? I know NOTHING about MAC's. Can someone please tell me how to check this, or how to uninstall any virtual machine to gain more space? I always thought a virtual machine would only be allocatted enough storage to "house" the image and grow as needed. Is there a hidden partition?
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Unknown Virtual Machine Partition - Not MAC user - help
- Thread starter jparton
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Sorry, just re-read the post.
If it was a Virtual Machine that he was running, chances are that it was a dynamically allocated Virtual Disk. By that, I mean that when tell the program to allocate 30GB, it doesn't actually allocate that (by default anyway). The VM only takes what it needs (17GB in your case) and only takes more as needed up to the specified maximum you set. So there probably isn't an extra 13GB lying around somewhere, it just never existed.
If that's not the case, you can use something like Grand Perspective (located here) to graphically map your files. This is really similar to the windows tool, WinDirStat, which it totally awesome.
If it was a Virtual Machine that he was running, chances are that it was a dynamically allocated Virtual Disk. By that, I mean that when tell the program to allocate 30GB, it doesn't actually allocate that (by default anyway). The VM only takes what it needs (17GB in your case) and only takes more as needed up to the specified maximum you set. So there probably isn't an extra 13GB lying around somewhere, it just never existed.
If that's not the case, you can use something like Grand Perspective (located here) to graphically map your files. This is really similar to the windows tool, WinDirStat, which it totally awesome.
No, virtual machines don't require "hard" partitions. If you already deleted a VM, you probably recovered all the disk space that's recoverable. If you're in doubt, go to Disk Utility and check if there any partitions that exist on the system, other than system one.
Not part of the Mac Intelligentsia and really appreciate recommendations like this. Thanks.
