I am posting this because I have read of people having tons of issues moving a windows install to a parallels virtual machines (*.hdd file).
My old machine...
Dell Optiplex 620
P4 2.7 ghz, 40 gig sata hd, 1 gig of ram.
My new machine...
iMac 17 inch core 2 duo 2.0 ghz (refurb), 160 gb sata hd, 1 gig of ram.
First I bought a sata to usb adapter from ebay from a seller named "colordrives".
The auction title was...
!NEW USB to IDE/SATA/ATA adapter for 2.5 3.5 HDD CDROM
I received the item and was pleased with the quality. It came with more then what is shown in the picture. It came in a box, with a power adapter with a standard molex connector for power and a serial ata power adapter as well. The adapter itself is well equiped with two flavors of IDE, 2.5 and 3.5. It also came with a serial ata cable because the adapter is to big to fit on a sata drive while the power is connected. (***Side note... I am sure it was made in China and I hate that everything is made in China these days. It does not say where it is made so I am not sure, but I am betting that it is made in China.)
I then took the drive out of the Dell Optiplex and hooked it up to the Mac via usb. I emidiatly created an image of the drive for backup purposes. I saved it as a *.dmg file. I launched Parallels OS installation assistant and clicked custom install. Choose windows xp and set my memory to 308 mb. I then selected "Use an existing hard drive image" and browsed to my image. I could not choose my *.img file, it was greyed out. So I browsed to the actual drive and tried to select that. Nope that didn't work either. No luck! While it appears that you can and should be able to do this you can not.
What was I to do. I have this brand new beautiful machine just glaring me down! I have to use it. It is awesome. I thought about it for a couple hours and decided to try one more thing...
I hooked the Dell drive up to my windows server 2003 box via the sata/usb connector, Launched the windows version of Parallels Image Tool and away I went. I choose Hard Disk Drive as the data storage device that I wanted the Image tool to operate with. And then I selected to create a new hard disk image. I selected my source drive as Physical HDD #1 since #0 was my windows server 2003 install and that is not what I want. I choose my desktop to save the image as delloptiplex.hdd and clicked next. I reviewed my choices and clicked start!
An hour and a half went by. All of the while I was wondering it this was all pointless. After reading all of these posts where no one has heard of anyone actually getting this to work. The process finished and I had a 37.1 gig delloptiplex.hdd file!
I opened parallels and selected File, New VM, then proceeded to setup my virtual machine. Once setup I paused to pinch myself before I launced my newly migrated xp install. I slowly clicked the play icon and BOOM! fatal error! No sound device. Well that is fine. My server has no sound card. Jumped into the VM settings and disabled the sound. Pressed the play icon again... Bios loaded... Black screen... Waiting... Black screen... Waiting... Black screen. Apparently I was waiting for nothing because that is what happend... Nothing. Until I hit enter. Then I got a bright BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH (bsod). I pressed play again and windows asked me wether I would like to boot normally or into safe mode because the system had recovered from a serious error. I choose safe mode and watched as all of the necessary files loaded. The system stopped at Mup.sys. I am a mac user so I assumed that nothing was wrong at this point and waited about 4 minutes. Then I started to search the boards here at parallels.com. I found one where the guy explains that swapping motherboards in a pc can cause this issue.
http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=3261&highlight=mup.sys
So, I went to theeldergeek.com and followed the instructions. Once done, I pressed the play icon one more time to start up my old Dell Optiplex 620! Success! It works. It booted fine although I did have to re-activate windows. After that I was in windows and it looked as it did on the dell. I installed parallels tools and all is well!
Last edited: Jan 18, 2007
