Boot Camp --> virtual hard disk?

My wife has been running Parallels with Boot Camp partition. Would it be possible for her to replace the Boot Camp partition with a virtual hard disk and then delete the Boot Camp partition?

Thanks!

 

Sure, try Parallels Transporter -- it can migrate your Boot Camp partition to a straight virtual machine. Please see its user guide.
How do you manage to delete and reformat the Boot Camp partition itself after the migration is up to you, e.g. you can backup the data (Mac's and newly created virtual machine) to some external storage and then reformat the hard disk.

 

Based on your suggestion I tried looking into the documentation for using Parallels Transporter to migrate my Windows 7 boot camp partition to a virtual disk/virtual machine in my OS X partition on my MacBook.

The documentation is out of sync with the (latest) version of Transporter installed on my MacBook. As a result I'm more confused now than when I read your post.

For example, in the section "Migrating Within the Boot Camp Partition" item #5 says to "select Local physical computer and click Next". The option "Local Physical Computer" does not exist in the app. The doc even has a screen capture from the app which shows this option does not exist.

Then in step #6 the doc refers to a Source Volumes window which I simply do not see and have no idea how to reach.

So how does someone use Transporter to migrate windows in a boot camp partition to a virtual machine? When I bring up the Mac app of Transporter I'm prompted to look for either a Remote Physical Computer or a Virtual Machine. Say what??

Since it's boot camp, the partition is on the same physical computer so that can't be the way to go.

And a Virtual Machine is what I'm trying to create from the boot camp partition on my MacBook. If I already had one, I wouldn't need Transporter, would I?

What I'm asking about has to be a relatively common scenario. It should be easier enough to get it to work. How do I do that?

 

Arrrrrrrrrrgh.

OK, I think I have successfully migrated the Boot Camp partition on my MacBook into a VM (.pvm file) in my Mac OS X 10.5.7 Leopard partition. While at this point I'm frankly not completely sure what steps I took to achieve this, I'm still going to try to jot down as much as I can recall. Even if it's no help to anyone else, it might help me out if I ever need to do this again.

The steps I took are probably not the only way to get this done. All I'm trying to do here is describe how I eventually was able to migrate my Windows 7 RC 1 partition to a VM on the OS X side of the MacBook.

To begin with, the help document for Parallels Transporter, while certainly a well-intended effort, is a confusing spaghetti mess of conflicting scenarios. I finally figured out what I needed to do was boot my MacBook to Windows in the Boot Camp partition, install the Windows version of Parallels Transporter v4.0, and run it.

You should be able to download the Windows version of Transporter from the download page for Parallels Desktop 4.0 for Mac. (I'm not linking directly to it because the link will no doubt change if/when a new version is released.)

The screens you see when you run the Windows flavor of Transporter in Boot Camp should look like those described in this section of the documentation. The process seemed straight-forward enough and ends with the creation of a virtual machine configuration file (.pvs) and a virtual hard disk file (.hdd). I had Transporter store them directly to a USB attached external hard drive.

The next step, where I booted Mac OS X and converted these files into a VM is where I'm not sure what I did. Here's what I recall.

1) I tried starting Transporter in OS X to migrate the .pvs and .hdd files. It would have nothing to do with them. Transporter was apparently looking for files for VM and it did not think that these files were that.

2) I tried opening the files in Parallels 4.0 directly from the NTFS external hard disk I had created them on. That also failed. For some reason Parallels insisted on having write access to these files.

3) So finally I copied the files from the external NTFS drive into a folder on my OS X drive. I think I was then able to File->Open the .pvs file with Parallels.

Whatever I did, it kicked off a relatively lengthy "configuration" process. After this automagic "configuration" completed, I found Parallels had created a .pvm (VM) file in my Parallels directory and also had deleted the folder I had copied the .pvs & .hdd files into.

This VM seemed to function correctly except for the sound. For some reason the input & output for the sound were "blank" in the configuration for the machine. I changed these to select the "defaults" and now sound seems to work OK in the Windows VM.

I also get a warning message when I start the VM that there is too little video RAM. I've been ignoring that since my video needs are small.

That's as far as I have gotten and I think it's also enough for this post.