Installing VM on external drive

Am I completely missing something, or is there no easy way to install a Virtual Machine onto an external drive in any of the current VM solutions (VMWare, Parallels, Virtual Box, etc.)?

I have an external drive, with 80gb of free-space, which I can partition as an NTFS volume if needed. It's partitioned as Master Boot Record, and has one other partition on it (which I use for large downloads and my music collection). What I would like therefore is my media partition, and to use the 80gb free-space as a second partition on which to install Windows for use as a virtual machine.

Now, I understand that Windows won't boot on an external drive, but this is irrelevant to a virtual machine anyway. Is there any way that I can go through the ordinary process of setting up a virtual machine, but instead use an actual drive partition instead of .hdd file or whatever? I don't really want to use image files when I have a perfectly good hard-drive available, which I can connect using either USB or eSATA (via a bridge to my Mac Pro's free SATA ports behind the fan).

Or is there some way to create an image manually that can be made to point it to a partition? I've tried searching for such a guide but haven't had much luck.

 

Hello,

You can change the default location of the virtual machine when creating it. Click on the link below and see step 7 in the link.
http://download.parallels.com/desktop/v4/docs/en/Parallels_Desktop_Users_Guide/22474.htm

 

That's only for choosing the location that the .pvm file goes though isn't it? I'm talking about using an actual NTFS (or whatever) volume, rather than using a disk-image, for installing the OS onto.

 

Hello,

We cannot install windows on an external hard drive using Parallels.
If you have already installed windows on the external hard drive then you can direct that on Parallels.