art_director said:
Another question.
I was thinking of setting up my machine as follows:
Drive 1 -- OS X
Your setup would make sense if you were setting up a multi-boot system ("bootcamp" in Mac terms) that let you run OS X, Windows or Linux "natively" on the Mac hardware. You can do that without Parallels** - but it means re-booting to change operating system, dedicating a disk partition (but not necessarily an entire disk) to each OS, and making sure that there's at least one partition in a format that all the operating systems understand and can use for shared data.
The whole point of Parallels is to avoid that!
Parallels installs like any other OSX application, and the "disks" for your virtual machines are just regular data files on the OSX disk that you can create, destoy and juggle around to your heart's content. If you move one to a different disc or directory then you'll have to make sure Parallels can find it, but the guest OS won't know any different.
As another poster pointed out, even if you create a 10GB "virtual" disk it starts out small and only grows as you use it.
Data sharing is handled using the network file sharing features of each operating system to access shared folders on the Mac or other virtual machines.
You *can* set parallels to boot from a "real" disk partition - or use a real partition for data - if you want to bounce between parallels and "bootcamp" witjout maintaining two separate windows installations, but this loses some of the flexibility of parallels with virtual disks and involves some rather hairy kludges to keep Windows software activation happy, so don't go down that route unless you have to.
** If you *do* want to multi-boot on a Mac Pro without Parallels, then you can do it this way: download BootCamp from Apple, install the bootcamp assistant and let it create a windows driver disk, but *don't* partition your disc or start the windows installer. Shut down the Mac, yank the disk drive out and replace it with a blank hard drive, then reboot with the Windows CD in the drive*** and install windows as if you had a regular PC. When done, re-instate the original hard drive and, if you hold down "option" while booting you'll get the option of Windows or OS X. This gives you more flexibility over partitioning (e.g. I like a "NTFS C" partition for the OS, a "NTFS D" partition for data and a small FAT32 partition that OSX and Linux can read&write to. I assume that you can rinse and repeat to install Linux on its own disc, or as a partition on the windows disk, but I haven't tried that yet - but most of the "issues" with Linux seem to involve having it share a disc with OSX.
*** and curse the lack of an accessible CD eject button!
