I’ll post here - despite this being a Mac problems as much as a Windows one.

The story so far - I added extra HD capacity to my MacPro, and this has allowed me to move my Parallels disk images around. They are on the smaller of the two internal HDs now. Of late, Windows XP has been complaining that it’s running out of disk space, so using Parallels I allocated more thinking that Windows would get that immediately. I was wrong. In the virtual machine, it means that the HD Windows sees now has 2 partitions. Thankfully, I have a backup, so the cock-up was reversed.

My plan is to create a new disk image, and move my Windows XP install from image 1 to image 2. Parallels lets you create “expanding” disk images - so a 128GB is the theoretical limit - the file size will be as big as needed to hold the data.

I can:

1 - Create a new Windows Disk Image, boot from that and use Windows to move the Windows install from Image 1 to Image 2 - a straight Windows based file copy.

2 - Use Finder on my Mac to move the files. Parallels lets me share disks with the Windows system, and even has a tool to open thre disk images when th guest machine is not running. So I can use Finder to copy the files.

I am wondering if these are the right thing to do, or is there a better way?

Personally I'd use somethink like Acronis to copy the whole "drive" to another larger "drive" much the same as if they were physical disks