I never talked to Acronis nor did I had to, I just used it and it worked, there's no rocket science here if you know what you are doing, it's all relatively transparent.
I'm saying this because no one will say they support it under Parallels (or VMWare, or VirtualBox...), what you're asking for is out of radar for these companies, it's a very particular request.
I've done this type of things myself out of necessity and because I can, I've done it the hard way doing bit by bit cloning using g4u (free but for VERY experienced users), which creates an unbootable clone and requires the so called 'Repair Install' to make it work (because of hardware differences). And I've used Acronis True Image (with plus pack) to make complete backups of real PCs and to test these backups I've created full functional VMs from the backups, very easily, so I'm very certain it works the other way to, simply because the hardware communication it requires is exactly the same, so if it works in one way it will work the other.
The thing that is particular to Acronis and why I suggested it, is because it has the ability to clone to dissimilar hardware, and this is a very special feature that will spare you hours, even if you know what you're doing.
I'm just sharing my experience, and I don't think you'll find much people that have done this. So, Acronis TI+pack is the only utility I can recommend that will likely be able to do this cloning (dissimilar hardware), I can google for others and so can you but I haven't tested them.
Last edited by a moderator: Jan 3, 2012
