How to setup a Bootcamp Partition

I apologize ahead of time because I am sure this has already been asked and written about somewhere else. Please, just point me in the right direction since I cannot find it to save my life.

I have a Bootcamp partition. I want to use Parallels to access the partition while in Mac OS X without losing the ability to restart and go into a native version of Windows 7.

Thank you.

 

Try this (using Parallels Desktop 5):

File -> New... -> Skip Detection -> Windows 7 -> Custom -> select Processors (probably half what you have), select RAM (probably half what you have or at least 4 GB less than your total) -> Boot Camp Partition -> select the disk and which partitions are for Windows 7 -> Shared Networking -> Virtual Machine -> select name and location.

 

Would this also work if the Windows 7 was on a completely separate drive (like a Mac Pro)?

 

It shouldn't matter where your OS is. You just need to tell Parallels which disk and partitions.

I have 4 disks in my Mac Pro and a couple of external disks. I have 7 separate VM's setup for 4 of those disks. I have 3 of the VM's setup one for each partition on one disk. I can run them all at the same time if I wanted to because none of them point to the same partition (although there's no reason why a VM can't point to more than one partition or disk otherwise).

There's a couple issues with Parallels BootCamp feature though:

1) You may need to reselect the drive for Parallels every time you restart the Mac if the Mac has more than one drive.
http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=102081

2) You may need to fix the active partition flag for the virtual hard drive before or after selecting the disk in Parallels if you have more than one BootCamp partition on the same disk and use rEFIt to boot between them.
http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=95585