Today I will be replacing the hard drive on my Mac. I already have everything backed up, however I plan on doing a clean install and getting rid of a bunch of crap I no longer use. On my mac I am using the latest version of Parallels Desktop for the Mac and have one Virtual Machine which is running Windows 10. When I put Windows on this mac originally I loaded Windows 7. Is there anything I need to do to deactivate my key before reformatting? How do I load Windows 10 on it again? (Or do I need to reload Windows 7 and then upgrade to 10? Anything else I should know?
Hello RichardF3, You may backup your existing Windows 10 Virtual Machine and use it after rebuilding your Mac. You may simply back up the entire virtual machine by copying its .pvm file (it contains the whole virtual machine) to another place on your Macintosh HD or to external hard drive. You can find virtual machine's .pvm file by following these steps: Right-click on Parallels Desktop icon in Dock and choose Control Center (Virtual Machine's list in older versions) Right-click on virtual machine and choose Show in Finder. If you choose to reinstall the Windows Virtual Machine from scratch, you can install the Virtual Machine as mentioned in this article. If you have the product key for Windows 7, you will have to first install the Windows 7 Virtual Machine and then upgrade it to Windows 10. Let us know if you need more information.
