Questions before purchase.

Hi there, my Macpro has 2 harddrives in it, and currently I have OSx installed on one drive and Windows 7 on the other, I was interested in integrating them into one OS, my idea is to have Parallels run withen OSx when I need the Win7 Partition as opposed to shut down, and reboot into Win7 and vice versa.

So my basic question, if I buy Parallels, will I be required to reinstall Windows 7, or can it infact be installed on OSx, select my 2nd drive, and boot directly from it within the OSx partition on the first drive? Or will I have to reinstall windows 7 completely?

Thanks!

 

The Parallels Desktop "hard drive" is a virtual drive. It does not exist in physical form. My Windows XP PVM is a 45 Gb file in
/Users/[my name]/Library/Parallels/Microsoft Windows XP.pvm
Once you create it, Parallels VM can access directly any drive that is connected to Mac OS. (The drive is networked to Windows.) Accordingly, you could keep all of your data files on your second drive, but never have to boot into it. Rather, you would just start Parallels in OSX; and once Windows is running, access your files in the network drive.
This assumes that you can already access the second hard drive from within OSX.