# Possible to run a Virtual PC completely from an external hard drive?



## ba11hill (Feb 20, 2008)

Ill beg forgiveness in advance because I know some of this has probably been discussed repeatedly, but I am a little confused.

I just bought a brand new Imac, 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, running OS X 10.5.2.  I work for the Federal Government, an unfortunately we are still using Corel Word Perfect.  So, I've done some research and decided to go the virtualization route.  What I'm confused about is:

Can I buy an external hard drive, hook it up to my Imac via Firewire, and install anything related to or having to do with Windows on the external hard drive?  I esentially want to have the Mac drive and the Windows drive completely and physically separated.  Some of the reading I've done indicates that Windows will not run well from an external drive, and some very complicated partitioning is needed....The threads I read were somewhat older though....

I'm open to either Fusion or Parallels...I have no real preference, I just would really like to keep everything MS related on the external drive....

Thanks in advance for your patience, and please feel free to respond to me as if I am a kindergardener........Bryant in Chicago


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## ElDiabloConCaca (Feb 20, 2008)

If you use VMWare's Fusion or Parallels, then yes, you can have the Windows disk image located anywhere you like -- even on a network share.

No complicated partitioning, no scattered Windows files everywhere (VMWare and Parallels both keep the Windows installation inside of one, big, monolithic file), no fussing.  Just make sure that if you're using a locally-attached disk that the disk is formatted in a format that's not too antiquated (I recommend HFS+)... if you stick a virtual machine image file on a FAT32 disk, then you'll soon hit a file-size limitation with FAT32.  Just make sure the FireWire disk is formatted as HFS+ and you're off to the races.


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## ba11hill (Feb 20, 2008)

Super, thanks for the input.  I did recently notice on fourm.parallels.com that Parallels does not support devices attached via firewire (from Parallels team member Alecia):

_Hello,

unfortunately firewire devices are not supported. But if you want to connect external HDD via Firewire port you can make a shared folder in your external hard drive so that you can see your files stored on your drive in your guest OS. Please note that you should install Parallels Tools before this action. To make a shared folder, you should turn off your guest OS. After that open Shared Folder Options in Configuration Editor and specify the folder you want to share with guest OS. After making changes in Configuration Editor turn on your guest OS. You can see your shared folder&#8217;s icon on your desktop in the guest OS.

For more information about setting up a shared folder, please, see page 207 of the User Guide. 

__________________
Best regards,
Alicia._


Anyone know if Fusion supports devices connected via firewire??


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## ElDiabloConCaca (Feb 20, 2008)

What Parallels is talking about there is not running the actual Windows Virtual Machine from a FireWire drive, but sharing the files from your Mac stored on a FireWire drive with the Windows Virtual Machine.

You can install and run a Windows Virtual Machine just fine on a FireWire drive with either Parallels or VMWare's Fusion.  You could even make a RAID array of USB 1.1 floppies and install the virtual machine there -- and it would run flawlessly... very slowly, but flawlessly.

As a rule of thumb, if you can browse the location (FireWire drive, network drive, NFS export, etc.) with Mac OS X's Finder, then you can install a virtual machine there and run it with Parallels or Fusion.


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## Giaguara (Feb 20, 2008)

About the same way. None of the current ESX, VirtualCenter, or hosted VMware products support firewire. But the way Alicia support it works (that way it worked also in Workstation 4, therefore it works for Parallels too).


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## ba11hill (Feb 20, 2008)

Thanks so much for the help...I'm gonna give it a shot!


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## ba11hill (Feb 22, 2008)

Just to update...I decided to use Parallels...Installed it on my IMac's hard drive, then installed Windows XP SP2 on an external hard drive connected via 800 Firewire...Worked perfectly and quickly.  Updated all of the usual Windows bull#$!%, and my Virtual PC works better and faster than my 2 year old Compaq laptop running the same OS!  

Strangely enough...I got the Virtual PC to run several games for my 5 year old that say they require DirectX 9.....Runs them with no problem (granted they are childrens games...)!  If what I read was correct, Parallels was only supposed to support games up DirectX 8x....

Anyway...amazingly easy to set up and run!  Thanks for the help and the Forum!


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