Boot Camp partition in Parallels (Don't do it?)

[arbi]

My conclusion on accessing the Boot Camp partition in Parallels: Don't do it.

It's simply not worth the trouble and it doesn't bring you any real benefits. In my case Parallels has completely destroyed three Boot Camp partitions and even when it was working it was much slower and less stable than a normal Parallels virtual machine. In addition to this, Parallels appears to make changes to the Windows installation in Boot Camp and that is by definition a bad thing. The whole reason for creating a Boot Camp partition is to have a real native installation of Windows running directly on your hardware. If you let Parallels mess with that you are threatening the integrity of that system -- at least in my case the Boot Camp Windows installation was always funky after Parallels had touched it.

Conclusion: If you want to access Windows without leaving OSX then use a real virtual machine. If you want to access Windows directly on the hardware use a real Boot Camp installation and don't allow Parallels anywhere near it. Keep the two things completely separate and you will be much, much happier.

The above was posted by someone over 2 years ago. I would like to know if what he said still holds true today with current versions of everything ie. PD/BootCamp/Win7.

I tried posting this in a sticky thread but it didn't work even after 24 hours so I am trying here as a new thread.

 

[Yeolegood]

Basically Parallels Desktop supports such feature as using existing Boot Camp installation in Virtual Machine, still Parallels Desktop was intended for creating a Virtual Machine and installation of Guest Operation System on it's Virtual Hard Disk in the first place. So it is more optimized for it and this was more intensively tested (it does not mean that Boot Camp option was left without attention, but simply that it has lower priority).

In case you are concerned about possible issues your Boot CAmp based Virtual Machine can run into, you can migrate your Boot Camp partition to a bootable Parallels virtual machine or Parallels virtual disk, you can choose between two scenarios:

Migrating via Boot Camp Virtual Machine

- Open Parallels Desktop

- Create a Virtual Machine for Boot Camp (or use existing one): Using OS Installation Assistant, select Custom mode, Select Use Boot Camp as virtual hard disk option (Be sure that your virtual machine configuration includes Network Adapter and all necessary network options are specified)

- Run this virtual machine created for using the Boot Camp partition

- Install Parallels Transporter Agent inside this virtual machine, Agent will start automatically

- Run Parallels Transporter on your Mac

- Select 'From another computer' as Migration Method, select Network Connection (Migration Source=your Boot Camp virtual machine)

and then migrating via the Boot Camp virtual machine is much alike the classical remote migration

Migrating Within Boot Camp Partition

-Install Parallels Transporter Agent on your Boot Camp partition

-Then you have two ways:

* Migrate your Boot Camp partition using 'From this computer' option locally on external storage device (or Share), copy resulting .pvs and .hdd on your Mac, open resulting virtual machine in Parallels Desktop, attach Mac HD\Library\Parallels\Tools\vmtools.iso in its configuration manually, and run resulting virtual machine.

* Migrate your Boot Camp partition using 'From remote computer''option on other computer (Mac). Migrating from a remote Boot Camp partition is much the same as the classical remote migration between two computers and proceeds under the same Parallels Transporter migration modes.

 

[arbi]

Migrating means I can no longer share all the changes done whenever I switch between VM and BC if I'm not mistaken. Also, if I want to keep the BC windows install I'd have to provide a new and different key for the migrated portion right? While at this topic, I'd like to confirm that if I run Parallels off the BC partition (not migrating) that I can use the same windows key. Is this true? Thanks.