How to get your Ghost image into Parallels

[Zacchino]

Hi there,

I have a WinXP SP3 with alot of softwares, and years of tweaking, software settings and so on that I always backup with Norton Ghost.

I'm looking to go mobile so I recently purshased a Macbook Pro, and bought Parallels Desktop 7 for Mac.

- I first installed a new virtual machine with Windows XP SP3, and it's working great.
- Then I rebooted the virtual machine with the Ghost Recovery CD image (just like I would do on any PC)
- Once launched, it asked me where I have my backups, so I plugged in my external HDD in USB
- The Ghost Recovery Browser succesfully found my HDD and my backups
- Then I asked the Ghost Recovery to Recover my whole HDD to the Virtual Machine

When finished, it rebooted with the (un)famous BSOD (Blue Screen 0x0000007c).

What did I miss ?
From what I read there's something going on with the HAL.dll / ACPI Drivers configurations of my initial PC that doens't like the Parallel's Virtual Hardware ?

If anyone succesfully got an Image (of any kind, Ghost, Acronis, etc.) of their Windows XP SP3 to Parallels Desktop I'll be happy to know how to do the same.

PS : The Parallels Transporter 7 utility doesn't work for my Windows XP SP3, it always says that my Hard Drive is not a Base Hard Drive (but I checked and it's definitely a Base Hard Drive, Primary and Active), and that it does not contain any OS (It's a joke right ?).

Thank you in advance for your precious time, and your kind help !

 

[Parallels User]

The hardware is different, you don't simply copy from one system to the other, Windows doesn't like that, it has to be forced to rescan the new hardware. Boot the VM from a Windows XP (slipstreamed with SP3, google this and 'nLite' if you don't know what I'm talking about), and do a Repair Install.

A Repair Install is almost like reinstalling Windows except you don't lose your installed programs or settings, but you'll need to reapply all necessary updates released after SP3.

There are tools like Acronis True Image (with plus pack) that simplify all this by having an option to restore to different hardware which doesn't require repair install. I guess Ghost doesn't support that.