THE STORY I created a VM hosting a Windows XP Pro guest OS on my MacBook Pro using Parallels Desktop. My expectation was that I could simply copy the VM directory over to my PC and run that VM on the PC under Parallels Workstation. This is the kind of thing I am used to doing with VMWare and I expected it would work. I copied the rather large directory and waited 1/2 hour for 12GB of files the go accross. Checked the file sizes to make sure everything made it over. I put the VM folder in the My Documents\Parallels Virtual Machines\ folder and cranked up Parallels Workstation on the PC. The machine was recongized.. sort of. SYMPTOMS The machine Configuration and Resources appear as they should. This looks like information that sits in the xml config files I see inside the directory representing the VM. But when I browse down into Hard Disk 1 options things aren't filled in. Not sure if this is normal or not. They may get filled in after I open the VM the first time. Now when I press the VMs Power On button, I get the following message box: ----------------------------------------------- Parallels Workstation Virtual machine configuration seems to be inconsistent. The following problem is found: Unable to get the geometry of the virtual hard disk. Perhaps file c:\Documents and Settings\mark\My Documents\Parallels Virtual Machines\oryx\winxp.hdd is not a valid virtual hard disk image file. -------------------------------- I best I can tell the files are identical on the two machines. The main thing I find suspect though is that on the Mac OS X version the file ~/Library/Parallels/oryx/Windows Disks is a symbolic link to what appears to be a pseudo file /private/tmp which I am guessing is some interface to the virtual drive on the VM served up to the host OS. Moving from OS X to windows, this link would have been lost and it is hard to make sense of what it ought to be under Windows. MOTIVATION I have not used Parallels Workstation on the PC. My main motivation for doing so is to run the VMs that I developed under Mac OS and to allow people in our development team to exchange VMs. I'm the only Mac user on the team, and others are VMWare users. I would like to stick with Parallels since it such a joy to use on the Mac. But, to produce things of value to the team, I need to solve the problem of making my VMs run on PCs as well. If I don't make this really easy for them, I am going to get pressure to switch over to the familiar VMWare -- which we already use for this purpose. QUESTION So, has anyone had success moving Max OS X originated VMs over to Parallels Workstation and running them on Windows based PCs? Is this even supposed to work? If so, what is the trick to it? What do I need to look out for? Cheers! markcornwell mark@cornwell.net mcornwell@globalinfotek.com
