Advice needed: Running Transporter from XP

[pooch]

Hi,

I am about to take Parallels and its Transporter for a test drive, but I'm confused by a couple of points. I want to create an image of my XP machine and run it under Parallels on my Mac with Leopard.

1) When I run Transporter on my XP machine, according to the Transporter documentation, "Parallels Transporter reads and modifies the system files to make the operating system on the image bootable with Parallels virtual machine." I hope that means that the system files that are modified are the copies that are going into the virtual disk image file. Transporter won't actually be modifying systems files on the source machine, will it? And if it does, will I still be able to boot XP on the source machine after I run the Transporter?

2) I'm planning to use Transporter's Advanced Migration Mode instead of Express mode because I need Transporter to write the files to an external device that has enough disk space to hold my XP image. (My XP drive currently uses about 80 GB and has only 20 GB free, and I assume the virtual disk image written by Transporter will be about 80 GB.) The external drive can't be formatted FAT32 because there's a 2GB or 4GB file size limit. So I think I should format the external drive NTFS. But will the Mac then be able to read the virtual disk image file from the NTFS drive?

3) Finally, when I start Parallels on the Mac and want to point it to the XP virtual disk image for the first time, should I first copy the image file from the external drive to an available partition I've got on the Mac? Or should I point Parallels to the image on the external drive because Parallels is going to create a local image on my Mac boot partition anyway?

Thanks very much!

. . . Phil

 

[John@Parallels]

1. Parallels Transporter modifies files only on created image , not on source system, please be aware when you asked to provide Windows installation CD, you need to prrovide CD with the same Service Pack level as installed in Windows, if you do not have such CD, you need to slipstream SP in CD http://www.helpwithwindows.com/WindowsXP/winxp-sp2-bootcd.html

2. Mac OS can read NTFS file system (read only)
3. As it can only read you need to copy to mac in order to be able to start VM

 

[pooch]

Thanks for your reply, John. I successfully Transported yesterday and am now running my familiar WinXP desktop on my second monitor.

It took 2 hours to for Transporter to create a 60 GB hdd image file, so for those who think Transporter is stuck, you do have to give it a lot of time. I kept Window's Task Manager open to watch the 2 Parallels processes. They never took more than 2% of CPU, but they were never idle for long. So you just have to be patient.

I'll be spending the next day or two making sure everything I need in Windows is able to run. Then I'll happily pay for a real activation key.

Thanks!