How do I copy (clone) a virtual disk to a real partition?

southpac · #1 December 14th, 2006, 03:00 AM

Now that Parallels reportedly plays nicely with Boot Camp, I have ordered a 160 GB Seagate drive to go in my MacBook Pro Core Duo 1.

What I would like to do is make a 40 GB partition for Boot Camp / Parallels so that I can boot up under boot camp when I need real XP grunt.

The question is thus: given I have a 10 GB non expanding parallels virtual disk with a fully patched install of XP and Office pro, with printers and anti-virus and everything, how do I go about cloneing this onto a real partition?

I dont believe the parallels disk tool can do this, is there a way? Presumably I can run some windows thing to do this? If so which (cheap) tool will do this?

Otherwise is there another way?

Thanks in advance!

MM

**fryke** · #2 December 14th, 2006, 05:26 AM

You won't be able to boot (via BootCamp) into a startup volume created by Parallels. It expects quite a different PC to run on. What you'll need to do is use BootCamp to set up Windows XP SP2 like that and _then_ you can use that in Parallels as well. The other way 'round doesn't work (yet).

southpac · #3 December 14th, 2006, 05:49 AM

Well thats a super shame then. I was hoping to avoid some work. Now I guess I will have to enjoy that thrill of re-running all those hundreds of download patches to get Windows & Office up to something bordering on safe. Dang! Is this because the boot camp install process has to slather XP with Apple Antihistamine goop to stop the hardware reject the XP Histamines?

**fryke** · #4 December 14th, 2006, 06:49 AM

*laugh* ... No, I don't think so. It may even work. I think it's rather about startup processes, i.e. which partition is which, does the system (Windows) know about this etc. It _could_ be that it'd simply run, find all this new hardware and need reactivation (because clearly, many things have changed between "boots"). But clearly, Parallels' intention is to make the other way work (I've no idea how _well_ it works, haven't tried it myself and actually, 2.5 is in early beta currently...).

It might be worth a try, but I wouldn't know how to bring a Parallels disk image onto a partition. You could, however, use Parallels to get all the updates beforehand, so you don't have to have your Bootcamp partition hooked to the internet before applying the updates and installing security software etc.

southpac · #5 December 14th, 2006, 07:18 AM

I was actually thinking about running my old image IN parallels, mounting the actual new boot camp partition as a volume and then copy stuff from the parallels image into boot camp.

Possibly thinking about it (and having re-read the boot camp blurb [have never used boot camp]) I suspect its going to be more hassle than its worth to try and scavange anything from my parallels image to use in the new boot camp / parallels set up (I dont have any documents in this build).

Shame though!