I have successfully gotten Parallels to use my BootCamp partition as a virtual machine! The only trouble is, whenever I start this up, I get a DOS-like menu asking me if I want to use the "Windows XP" configuration or the "Parallels" configuration. I'm guessing that the former is the one I use to startup via BootCamp, and the latter is for use by Parallels. So how can I "teach" the machine to use the former config for BootCamp and the latter for Parallels, or (failing that), delete one of the two configs?
Hi, I have the same bootmenus, but it doesn't bother me - What's more annoying is the fact, that I get an 2nd bootmenu after I choose betweens Bootcamp and Parallels Configuration. I would like to skip the 2nd one. Any ideas out there? P hil
What's really bugging me is that on my MacBook, the internal keyboard doesn't work until after you get into windows, so I have no way to actually get through these screens short of plugging in an external keyboard.
Sounds familiar. On my iMac, all I have to do is unplug my regular USB keyboard and plug it back in (annoying, but not as bad as needing a whole separate keyboard). I'm not 100% certain, but I think this problem does not occur all of the time, just occasionally, at least for me.
The first menu that comes up is the XP boot menu. The contents of this menu is controlled via a file called boot.ini on the root of the C: drive in XP. If you look at the contents of this file, you can see that you need both of these options in the menu. Each item loads a different kernel and a different hardware extraction layer (HAL) based on how XP will be used. You really can't remove or change either one of these items and expect everything to work right. You can change the timeout on this menu, but based on the fact that you're using the same install in a VM and natively on hardware, I don't think you would want to. The second menu that comes up is the XP hardware profile menu This menu is used by XP for when you have different hardware profiles. One profile helps XP load the parallels drivers for video, etc. The other one loads the native drivers that Apple supplies for XP. This is the simplest way to make sure that your XP install works both when you use it via Parallels and via Bootcamp. To work with the hardware profiles right click on the My Computer icon in windows and choose Properties from the menu that pops up. click the hardware tab choose the hardware profiles button Once you are there you can rename the profiles, chose what one you want XP to use by default if you don't select one, and change the timeout for the menu. Unfortunately, I don't know of way to automate the selection of the second menu since we are using the same windows install and home directory no matter what option we choose at the boot manager menu. If these were truly two separate windows installs, it would be a different story as each install would have it's own hardware profile. Hope this helps someone out some.
Thanks for this very informative reply. That's something I'll have to consider, but knowing that the one time I forget or get distracted and it auto loads the wrong profile, it will probably explode, makes me hesitant to do this. Also, the number of times I can activate my copy of windows has now maxed out. So I have that to deal with now.
