Resize Bootcamp/Parallels Partition?

Hello,

I am planning on upgrading my hard drive in the next few weeks. The whole thing. I know I can restore the Mac portion of the drive by first placing the blank drive into the computer and formatting and installing a fresh Mac OS onto it. From there I can restore from a Time Machine backup.

I am looking to INCREASE my Boot Camp partition from 60ish GB to more like 150GB on the new drive. I have resized the Windows partition before using the fine utility of WinClone but I am worried how Parallels will respond this time since I didn't have Parallels last time I resized. ((Winclone backs up the Windows partitions, you then delete the Boot Camp partition, create a new Boot Camp partition with larger space, and restore the WinClone backup to that space and have WinClone expand the Windows filesystem.))



My best/safest guess is to uninstall Parallels altogether before I back up the drive then after the drive is backed up without Parallels installed, create and restore the larger partition and the reinstall/reactivate Windows.

I'd prefer to not have to reactivate Windows though when I reinstall Parallels, so is there a safe way to use Winclone to restore a larger Boot Camp partition (with Parallels still installed) that won't make Parallels flip out when booting from the restored drive?

 

Remove the hard disk from the virtual machine configuration. Then add a new hard disk to the configuration and reselect the Boot Camp partition. This will make sure the virtual hard disk is properly setup. I don't know about activation issues. If WinClone worked for you before, then it should work in this case too.

 

Thank you for the quick reply!! Not having to remove Parallels Tools on the Windows side makes my job a little less frustrating. I'm thinking though that if I have to remove the Boot Camp VM before I switch hard drives and set the Boot Camp VM back up again, I am assuming though that I will need to reactivate the OS.

I was just concerned about whether or not I needed to remove the Parallels Tools on Windows or if that would create any type of issue when restoring and booting from BC or the VM on the new drive.

 

Interestingly, I did just that under identical circumstances. I'm now getting a message that Windows is not installed in the virtual machine.

This is extremely strange. Parallels seems to have gone through all the motions of allowing me to import a complete and separate VM from BootCamp, including setting up an alleged > 400 GB hard drive (which would make sense given the capacity of my Mac HD.) However, it's still limiting me to the original 30 GB partition. Thought I had this solved by getting the BootCamp partition off the list of bootable drives, and replacing it with the .hdd file. But it looks like Windows never got there, despite my being prompted repeatedly to re-enter the serial number of an already-validated copy.