How can I boot an existing OS X installation inside Parallels Desktop for Mac?

I have an older OS X installation on an external hard drive, and I'd like to boot it inside a Parallels Desktop VM in similar fashion to existing Bootcamp installs.

I tried adding the hard drive inside the VM or the external disk but it won't boot. Any thoughts?

 

Questions concerning "convert it into virtual machine" with Parallels 9, OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard as guest: iiuc, 10.6 Client cannot be converted into a virtual machine as it is not a permitted guest OS; but an installation of 10.6 Snow Leopard Server can be converted into a virtual machine, yes?

If that installation of 10.6 Snow Leopard Server is located on an external drive; or is on a different partition on the same drive as the partition running Parallels; what actually happens: does parallels create a new .pvm file, and clone the Snow Leopard Server install to that new .pvm? Or?

thank you

 

If you have an existing Snow Leopard Server (or Lion, Mountain Lion etc) installation on an external drive you can clone it to your pvm by starting up with a genuine OS X install medium that is accepted by Parallels and then connecting your USB external drive (when parallels asks you if you want to connect the USB drive to the host or the guest OS choose the guest) and, after going through the language chooser screen, instead of proceeding directly to the actual install going into the "Disk Utility" section. from there you can 'restore' the contents of your external USB drive to the PVM drive.

 

I don't bother with OS X as old as 10.6. From a licensing point of view I should be able to do this with any version of OS X 10.7 - 10.12. I don't see why this is not possible, with Parallels I can run Windows from and existing partition and from inside a parallels hdd image. I can run OS X from inside a parallels hdd image but not from a real partition. I would like to be able to boot into an OS X install with my mac and be able tot start it from another install with parallels. I'm a developer and I run multiple installs for testing.

 

100% agree with Miros. This is definitely a feature that Parallels should implement. Parallels is not used solely by Windows users. Many of us use Parallels to launch different versions of OS X, and sometimes we need to be able to natively boot into those OS's, for instance when we need native audio or video driver support for various applications and not the Parallels generic equivalents. Please, consider adding this functionality so that OS X is given the same flexibility as Windows.

 

I also need to run a previous macOS 10.13 install from my current boot volume (10.14). At this point, I have given up on being able to use an existing boot partition in a Parallels VM (& VMWare doesn't seem to support this either), so now I have practical questions about how to convert this partition into a VM. Since I already have all the data on a partition, if I create a VM from the partition (& I can't seem to find instructions for doing this), will the new VM duplicate all the data? Since I'm dealing with 300 GB of data, do I need a partition with that much free space or can I create the VM on a smaller partition that simply refers to the data on the existing partition?
Worst case, I have a recent backup on an external drive, so I could wipe the partition for the data & create the partition there with the data from the external drive. And then there is the issue of seeing my other partitions from the VM.
It really shouldn't be this complicated...

 

I run beta testing on macOS 11 right now. I boot natively off a USB 3 SSD when I'm at home but sometimes I have processes running that prevent me from switching OSes and sometimes I'm at work with nothing to do, but may suddenly need to retask back to data entry. Being able to boot into the SSD with Parallels would have been nice, but I suppose that's not an important thing to include as it seems.

 

Sounds like this is still a desirable feature. I wonder what's stopping it, I can boot a Parallels VM off a USB stick just fine.

 

I do think it would be a good feature and one that people use often. Some people can use a given OS in a VM most of the time, but being able to boot it on bare metal when needed would be invaluable.