Parallels to boot camp?

I

IMaReallyBigFish

Bit poster
I know this is a bit backwards than what most people have done, but with the newer version of Parallels that comes out having Boot Camp support, is it possible to migrate a Parallels image to Boot Camp? Has anyone ever tried this?

The reason I ask is because I want to start doing more active development with WPF and .NET, and I'd like to take advantage of the full speed of my MacBook Pro.

Also, I might need some of the isolation of running Windows XP independently for work reasons (I need all the memory I can get out of this 2GB).

I'm trying to think if this is even technically possible and the only thing I can think of is somehow ghosting the Parallels image and restoring it on a Boot Camp partition.

The other reason I ask is because I've spent a LOT of time getting my VM up to date with all the software I need. I'd love to avoid doing that again if I could.

Don't get me wrong. I'm still a big fan of Parallels, but that Boot Camp support sounds exactly what I'm waiting for.
 
I did this

Yes, I tried this, did a lot of different installations, lately.

First, I spent much time to move my old installation from my
laptop to Parallels. This was not easy, because the transporter
was still broken, and I tried backup/restore software, but note
that this doesn't work with Norton Ghost or Paragon Exact Image.
Both want to boot from a rescue CD, and this is what the Macbook
currently can't do. Probably something is not emulated what these
apps need, it works great with my old Samsung p35.

You can of course (and I managed to) create a Bootcamp partition
and clone your virtual disk to it. I used Exact Image, with the help
of an external drive. But this is not easy to get right. Also, you need
to manually adjust boot.ini, because of the funny partition layout.

After I hat that setup, I searched for a good solution to access my
Mac data and tried some products. The most promising one was MacDrive,
unfortunately I had bad luck with it. It does not seem to be able to
act as reliably as the Mac OS, and when restoring 30 GIG of data
to the Mac Drive (bootet with Bootcamp), it stopped in the middle,
crasjed badly and left my OS X partition unusable.

So much for that. I gave up the idea to let anything but Mac OS write
to my partition.

Then I wanted to use Bootcamp together with my virtual disk from
Parallels. After some tries I cannot recommend this either.

I do use Bootcamp for special purposes like having full video hardware.
This is only a minimum 5G partition which I rarely use.
For mainenance, I have a config that mounts my virtual together with
BootCamp, but this is not for regular use:

Parallels support for Bootcamp still has the limitation that it wants
to see just one Windows partition in the whole System! That means,
the virtual will not start up if you have an external NTFS drive connected.
I hope this will improve, but right now it is a show-stopper.

For your purposes of having full speed and memory, you should try
to clone your virtual, but be aware that at least my MacBook pro crashes
from time to time. I guess the BootCamp beta is not yet for production use.

cheers - chris
 
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