HD Crashed, Need Parallels/Windows Restore Strategy

It is my sad duty to report that the hard drive on my not-quite-one-year-old MacBook crashed today. No wanna boot. Aloha, old disk drive, aloha new disk drive.

The good news is I'm pretty well backed up. The bad news is the backups are slightly fragmented.

I have all my MacApps and data EXCEPT Parallels/Windows backed up via Time Machine and Time Capsule. They tell me that it should all be recoverable.

However, I instructed Time Machine NOT to backup Parallels/Windows, since everytime there was a change, Time Machine would have to back up the whole 30GB partition.

I have a current back up of Parallels on an external Firewire drive that I ran a full, bootable backup to about three weeks ago (it's current because I don't really change much in my Windows data anymore, I just have to go back there once in a while to look at stuff).

So the question is: how do I restore Parallels/Windows if I restore everything else from Time Machine?

Could I just copy the entire Parallels folder from the external FW backup into the documents folder on the new drive when I get it up and running? That would bring the WinHD over to the new drive but.... would it work? I mean, I figure I'd have to reinstall Parallels, I'm not worried about that... but it would be slick if I could just copy the folder over and not have to reinstall Windows or the few apps that I use in Windows.

Could it be that simple?

Any thoughts on the subject will be much appreciated.

Thanks,

--PS

 

Try this:
1) Download the installer from this website and install the parallels program
2) Restore your (30gb of files) backup from your firewire drive. Do not restore the program, just the VM data files. (.pvs,.hdd, maybe a few more but not the app)
3) Run the VM, you should be good to go

Your VM will not show up in the VM chooser list so you have to (I think) hold the apple (maybe option?) key while starting Parallels to make the chooser window go away without exiting the program. Then open the VM manually using file->open.

EDIT: You said partition... was this running as a bootcamp partition? If so ignore all that advice... it was for running parallels without bootcamp.

 

That Easy? Really?

By "restore" do you mean just drag/drop the Parallels folder and all its contents from the Firewire drive to the new HDD in the laptop? That's easy enough.

Not quite sure what you're driving at there. VM chooser? What's that? I just run Parallels as an app from the dock.

I'm not using bootcamp, just running Parallels inside the MacOS. I just meant "partition" referring to the WinHD file within the "Parallels" folder in "documents." I guess I meant 'folder' or 'file.'

Sounds fairly straightforward.

Thanks,

--PS

 

Jus copy Virtual machine folder to Documents/Parallels and start Parallels Desktop, it will recognize the VM