I have Parallels 11 installed on my El Capitan iMac and I run Windows 10 with it. I am considering (for performance reasons) switching to a Boot Camp install and have a few questions. (1) If I make a Bootcamp Partition on my iMac, can I just move the Parallels 11 Windows 10 VM there or do I have to do a complete reinstall of Windows 10 on the partition? (2) Regardless if I have to a new install on the Bootcamp Partition or can move the VM, I have read that Parallels can still operate that Windows install from the Bootcamp partition while I am running MacOS (without re-booting the iMac). My question is: if I start using my Bootcamp install of Windows 10 using Parallels 11, does it see all the files and documents on that install? Meaning if I go into a Word or Excel document while running the Win10/Bootcamp install through Parallels and make changes to the document and then later switch to running Windows via re-booting directly to the Bootcamp install, will the changes to the documents be there? I guess I want to know if running Windows 10 on the Bootcamp partition via Parallels versus actually re-booting the Mac are actually accessing the same programs AND data files/documents? Hope I explained my questions properly. Thanks, Steve
Hello Steve, It is not possible to transfer operating system from an existing virtual machine to Bootcamp partition. However, you can run your Bootcamp partition with Parallels Desktop without having to restart your Mac. The Virtual Machine created based on Bootcamp partition will just be a mirror image of native bootcamp. So you will be able to run programs , save files on both native bootcamp & Parallels which indeed takes effect on both platforms. Thanks, Dhana
