Any way to set up boot from external drive?

[AlanG]

My Windows system died, and I've replaced it with a Mac running Snow Leopard.

I've got the remnants of my Windows system (the C drive) mounted as an external drive (at the moment USB, but I can also attach it via FireWire if needed). I would like to run a Windows VM, booting either directly off the external drive or using a copy of the drive (I have plenty of disk space to support a full copy).

I don't seem to be able to make this happen.

I came close using VMware Fusion. I was able to create a .VHD using Disk2VHD from Sysinternals, create a VM on a Windows system using VMware workstation, copy it to the Mac, and boot. BUT, Windows is apparently unhappy, because it keeps getting a BSOD at boot (presumably because of the IDE-vs-SCSI-disk-controller issue), and just keeps rebooting in a loop.

With Parallels, I tried:
(1) Setting the .VHD as the hard drive for the VM. It doesn't like that, and insists it's not a bootable drive.
(2) Importing the VMware VM. It doesn't like that, either.
(3) Creating a disk image (in .CDR format) and setting that as the hard drive. That didn't work either.

(Sorry, I don't remember the specific errors for #2 and #3, but can try them again if needed.)

Is there ANY way to boot this Windows image? The system it came from has hardware issues, and it won't power on. Without that, I can't install and run the agent on the source system.

I'd rather not spend money on getting it repaired if possible, and it seems that there OUGHT to be a way to create a VM as long as I have a bootable physical drive in my hands. Is there, or am I out of luck?

 

[joevt]

Can you use the partition as a Boot Camp type virtual hard disk in a new Parallels virtual machine? I'm not sure if Parallels supports the Boot Camp option on disks that are not formatted as GPT (there's no reason why it shouldn't). If it doesn't support it, then maybe it's possible to construct a virtual hard disk by hand that points to the partitions on the external hard disk even though it isn't a GPT disk (this would involve editing a DiskDescriptor.xml file and hoping that Parallels won't mind the missing GPT parts).

Another option is to create an uncompressed disk image (using the read-write option) of the entire disk (not just a partition) using Disk Utility, change the extension from .dmg to .hdd, then in Parallels, select the .hdd as the disk image for the virtual hard disk. You may want to convert it to an Expanding disk in Parallels after you checked to make sure it works.