Creating Hard Disk from a File

[SamuliM]

Hello,
I am migrating PC to a MAC. I already was able to migrate the OS (C but I would also like to migrate the data from second hard disk from my PC to MAC Virtual Machine and map it as drive E: like in PC.

Please suggest how I can clone the other hard disk to be used in my virtual machine. Should first clone to an .iso file?

Best regards,

Sam

 

[Hemnath@Parallels]

Hello,
I am migrating PC to a MAC. I already was able to migrate the OS (C but I would also like to migrate the data from second hard disk from my PC to MAC Virtual Machine and map it as drive E: like in PC.

Please suggest how I can clone the other hard disk to be used in my virtual machine. Should first clone to an .iso file?

Best regards,

Sam

Hi SamuliM. The process of migration creates a virtual machine (it is a file with the extension '.pvm') altogether. So migrating data alone is not possible using this method. A real way of addressing this scenario is to copy the necessary PC files to an external hard drive (with strictly 'exFAT' file system), create a secondary virtual hard disk for the virtual machine on your Mac, ensure that it's detected in Windows itself and, finally, move to it the PC files from the external storage.

 

[mmika]

SamuliM. you can create a copy of your second disk via disk utility. I think you meant this when pointed about .iso file.
I'm not familiar with disk utility flags and parameters, but you need to create a a complete raw image of a whole hard disk.
Another way would be to run 'dd' command in a terminal in mac to create disk image. If you already have such disk image just copy it to your mac.
After you get a file with disk image rename it to .hdd
After renaming this file to .hdd you will be able to add this file as a second disk to any VM. Parallels desktop should recognise it as an old format hard disk image and offer to convert it to current virtual disk format. The only drawback of this method that this virtual disk image is a plain/raw image, i.e. will require a lot of disk space on your mac hard drive. However later you will be able to convert it to compressed virtual hard drive via prl_disk_tool utility, but there would be another drawback, you need another considerable free space on your mac hard disk to perform conversion.

 

[SamuliM]

Thank you for your response. I was able to migrate second hard disk data using DriveImage XML. I took a copy of Hard disk data in source system and restored it in VM after assigning HDD as you mentioned.