Convert Boot Camp Partition to Virtual Disk

J

jalalabadass

Junior Member
My current situation:

Macbook using Apple Boot Camp to dual-boot with XP. When logged into OSX I can run parallels using the Apple Boot Camp partition.

My goal:

Convert the XP physical partition to a virtual disk for use in parallels and then blow away the Boot Camp partition so I can expand the OSX partition to fill the entire hard disk.


Does anyone have any suggestions on where to start? I thought that Transporter was equivalent to VMWare's P2V program but I guess not because it did not allow me to select a local disk to convert; only a remote machine.

Thanks in advance,

jalalabadass
 
I would have expected Transporter to work, but if it does not, try downloading Acronis Home 10.0. A two week trial is free, and buying it is about $50.

With Acronis you can create an image of your Bootcamp drive from inside Parallels (Acronis won't work if you boot into bootcamp) either on a DVD or in a file on any handy drive. You can then restore the identical configuration by booting from an Acronis recovery disk (which it will also create). The only tricky part may be getting that Acronis recovery CD to boot from Parallels, but it ought to work the same as if you were running an OS installer. Haven't tried it though.

If you try it, let us all know whether it works. Acronis is excellent on a real PC, and its backups work fine with Parallels; it's just the recovery side that is still a bit of an unknown.
 
Al_Q said:
I would have expected Transporter to work, but if it does not, try downloading Acronis Home 10.0. A two week trial is free, and buying it is about $50.

With Acronis you can create an image of your Bootcamp drive from inside Parallels (Acronis won't work if you boot into bootcamp) either on a DVD or in a file on any handy drive. You can then restore the identical configuration by booting from an Acronis recovery disk (which it will also create). The only tricky part may be getting that Acronis recovery CD to boot from Parallels, but it ought to work the same as if you were running an OS installer. Haven't tried it though.

If you try it, let us all know whether it works. Acronis is excellent on a real PC, and its backups work fine with Parallels; it's just the recovery side that is still a bit of an unknown.
Click to expand...
I haven't seen Acronis do the job personally, never had to yet, but I have heard of it working on both back-up and recovery at least a few times.
 
Another vote of confidence for transporter.

first set up parallels to use your bootcamp partition. Next install transporter agent on you bootcamp partition (when running under parallels). Launch transporter and treat it like you are importing a computer from another network (not an image file). This worked great for me.

I don't know if it matters but I removed the ACPI computer in the hardware tab of the control panel and left the "standard pc" (which is what all my other image files i made directly in parallels were).

-euthymic
 
Parallels & Acronis Success

Folks:

I just wanted to add that I've had success with multiple Windows XP installations by using Acronis TrueImage to make an image, and then booting the Recovery .iso file as a CD-ROM image.

While I haven't used Transporter yet to move a machine over to Parallels, I did it "the hard way" by using a Windows XP SP2 CD to do a repair re-install of Windows XP over the original image. In the two cases which I attempted this, the system settings, software installations, and security were maintained after the repair install.

I've also used this method to convert physical disk images to virtual disk images to save HDD space.

Parallels & Acronis are a good pair of tools. While I'm sure Transporter rocks, it might be nice to see a partnership between the two companies. :)

/dmfh
 
update

everything went flawlessly, i simply ran transporter in the bootcamp partition running as a vm and sent it to a network drive. i then removed rEFIt (my boot loader) by deleting the folder. after that i just used bootcamp under osx to delete the bootcamp partition and expand the osx one (this part was less than five mouse clicks and was surprisingly quick). all that was left was to copy the vm image back and fire it up!

thanks for everyone's advice. the reasons that i wanted the ability to run the bootcamp partition in a vm were the following:
  • improved performance of XP when booting directly into that partition
  • quick access to XP while currently in OSX (no reboot)
in fact, there were more drawbacks than benefits:
  • XP RUNS SLOWER as either bootcamp partition or VM in this configuration
  • loosing the dynamically sized image for the VM was a pain
 
Well it's to be expected that XP runs slower when run under parallels

I want to state that one of the reasons I personally want to clone my bootcamp is because I don't trust parallels to boot bootcamp without messing it up. Note: I'm using bootcamp successfully from within vmware fusion but I need to use parallels because there's a program that goes out of it's way to not run in vmware fusion but it runs in parallels.

So any solution that actually requires that you point parallels to your bootcamp partition in the first place is a non-starter for me.
 
I was saying that XP runs faster as a VM under parallels than as a bootcamp partition.

Regarding your issue of pointing parallels to your bootcamp partition: it works just fine.
 
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