Physical Hard drive as Virtual

This thread was moved from "User Solutions and Workarounds".
Alicia

Is it possible to add a physical hard drive for use in the virtual machine.

I am a user of SPINRITE by grc.com for correcting and maintaining a hard drive on a PC. Today on SecutityNow podcast 110 grc.com/securitynow a listener had made of this program as an ISO in VMware (server) on a Linux Machine where the physical HD was enrolled as a virtual HD.

Is this possible under Parallels?

Roger

 

hi,
yes it possible. Parallels Desktop for example can operates BOOTCAMP partition. It's one of the main features of last version.

 

sandro thanks,

My plan is to use SuperDuper! to clone the main system of my iMac and then run from the firewire external HD. With Parallels I wish to add the onboard HD as a virtual HD and the I can run spinrite to maintain that drive. A ny thoughts please.

Roger

 

hmm,
interesting. But couldn't you say what main goal of all those actions?

 

Take a look at spinrite.info or www.grc.com

Spinrite can recover a harddrive from low level. eg: if a real WinPC will not boot due to HD problems this utility will recover that hard drive. It was written by Steve Gibson.
Take a listen to his podcast with Leo Leporte

Can be found on iTunes or at www.grc.com/securitynow

My base reason of this process is that Macs do not have the BIOS of a PC but it must be simulated under any virtual system.

Roger

 

ok,
i took a look to Spinrite and think that the best way for Spinrite developers would to create a live CD based on some Linux distro. Best similar sample is Acronis True Image utility. You just inserting bootable media into drive, loading and maintaining necessary partitions at your hard disk which not busy with any operating systems at this time.

 

Actually that is not entirely true. All newer Intel Macs come with BIOS emulation so that you can run Windows (and if you have an older Intel Mac you can get a firmware upgrade to get the BIOS emulation). The BIOS emulation should make it possible to run any PC operating system, provided that the operating system has the proper drivers.

It looks like Spinrite creates its own bootable disk, so you should be able to boot directly into it. You probably could use Parallels for this if you wanted to though, but it would likely work better if you simply booted directly onto the Spinrite boot disk.

 

Generally, if a recovery tool is built for use with a boot disk rather than for being run directly within an OS, running the tool in a virtual machine is a bad idea. Ignoring the possibility of special hardware drivers, there is always the possibility that trying to make use of a recovery on a drive that is actually running the recovery software will cause collisions.

 

dodlaw,

Did you end up figuring this out? I need to do this as well.

Thanks,
Carl

 

soinrite oke

What happened to using spinrite within parallels ? This used to work with version 3.0 of PD, but now on Version 4.0 it gets so far and Parallels error report pops up, & Parallels quits.

Did parallels do some something different that wasan't in 3.0 ?