Abandon Boot Camp - how?

[scotto]

Is there a nondestructive way to move from a Boot Camp XP startup VM to a "native" Parallels VM?

When I originally installed Parallels I used the Boot Camp option. It seemed safer to have a fall back position in case some of my software didn't run well under Parallels, and I was told by tech support that there were no disadvantages to the Boot Camp option. Well, Parallels is running great and I haven't used Boot Camp to start up at all (and not because of the MS Office activation problem). In addition to preventing "suspend" functionality in Parallels, Boot Camp also precludes the useful "Snapshot" function in 3.0 that I was looking forward to. So I'm thinking about abandoning Boot Camp, if I can do it without starting all over again. Can Transporter move a VM from Boot Camp to a new, non-Boot Camp VM? Will anything be lost? Thanks.

 

[Erich]

To the best of my knowledge, Transporter will not migrate a Boot Camp VM. If this is indeed true, it's a major drawback. I just migrated my Boot Camp partition to Parallels using VMWare Converter (use Converter to create VMWare VM, then use Transporter to move the VMWare VM to Parallels). It's an unnecessarily convoluted process, but it worked fine.

 

[brkirch]

I've used Transporter to transfer my Boot Camp partition to a Parallels VM before and it worked just fine. VMWare Converter shouldn't be needed at all.

 

[Erich]

I've used Transporter to transfer my Boot Camp partition to a Parallels VM before and it worked just fine. VMWare Converter shouldn't be needed at all.

Hmm. I wish I'd known that. My searches on the subject turned up results like this one:

http://forum.parallels.com/thread3261.html, which looks like a nightmare.

At any rate, it's good to know that scotto has a couple of options.

EDIT: Apparently the documentation claims that Transporter will not work with Boot Camp, but some people have gotten it to work. See for example this thread:

http://forum.parallels.com/thread9451.html