About two weeks ago I installed a 30-day trial of VMware Fusion, and plan to purchase a license once the 30 days is up (assuming I can solve this problem). I purchased a copy of Windows 7 Pro soon after, and installed it onto my 2013 MacBook Air using VMware Fusion about a week ago, with no issues. I used the default settings, so the virtual disk drive was 60 GB. Today, when attempting to install a licensed copy of SAS at my university for coursework, towards the end of the installation I was given an error message indicating that there was insufficient space on the virtual machine to complete the installation. I cancelled the installation, deleted the files, and followed steps I found online to expand the size of the virtual machine's disk drive to 80 GB. While this worked and the Windows virtual machine now shows as having a total size of 79.9 GB, it seems to have caused problems with the available space on the Macintosh HD side.
The MacBook has 500 total GB of flash storage. There were over 200 GB free (can't remember the exact number however) this morning when the virtual machine disk was only 60 GB. After I expanded the virtual machine disk to 80 GB, there are now only 77.75 GB available on the Macintosh HD according to Finder. If I go to About this Mac --> More Info --> About this Mac --> Storage, it says there are a total of 65.63 GB available on the Macintosh HD, with 245.41 GB used up by the "Other" category. I clearly messed something up and probably should not have been messing around with disk size when I know very little about virtual machines and the like, but does anyone know what I did, and how to fix it? I do have a Time Machine back-up from 11:30 PM last night on an external hard drive, before I did this. Would restoring my Mac in full from this Time Machine back-up solve the problem?
I sincerely appreciate any help. Thank you!
Edit: Just wanted to edit to add that just I ran Disk Inventory X on the Macintosh HD, and it confirms there is actually only 293.6 GB of material on there. I am not sure if this would include the 80 GB taken by the virtual machine. Even if it doesn't, I would assume that should leave closer to 120 GB available? Yet Finder still displays only 78 GB available, and Disk Inventory X shows only 61 GB available in the "summary" screen.