Run Boot Camp from Parallels HD *FILE*

Hi,

I am fully aware that Parallels can run off of a Boot Camp partition. However, does the opposite work? In other words, I have been using Parallels in Coherence mode by running from a virtual hard disk installation of Windows XP, and now I want the option of booting fully into XP using Boot Camp but still run off the virtual HD FILE. Is this possible?

If not, is there an (easy) way to convert my Parallels virtual HD FILE/OS into a Boot Camp partition? Maybe a step-by-step guide, or even a tool that does this for you (including moving disk space around to create the new partition)? I realize I'm asking for a lot, but hopefully it exists.

Thank You,
Eric

 

Nope. You can't do this right now.

In order to boot off a file in your Mac partition you would have to change the EFI (like a bios) to support it. ... and that isn't going to happen any time soon.

There is a way to convert a Parallels partition to bootcamp.... I think the Parallels Transporter can do it...

 

I'm not sure exactly what transporter will do for you..but yoiu might be able to do something like the following if you want to convert your file to a real partition.

1. Create your boot camp partition
2. Create a VM in Parallels that uses the Boot Camp partition
3. Add your existing drive image (after backing it up, of course!) to the same VM as a secondary drive
4. Use some bootable CD within the VM (GParted live CD maybe?) to clone the partition from your file to the real partition on the drive.
5 Windows will probably die a death if you try and boot into it via Boot Camp, so you may need to do a repair install. This will keep all of your installed settings and programs intact and the system should be exactly as it was once you finish.
6 Once windows is happy booting from Boot Camp, then you can try using the Parallels VM to start it up.

If anything is going to go horribly wrong with this, I'd expect it to be step 4 - I am not sure how good the BIOS emulation within parallels is and if it would work properly with the various drive/partition cloning utilites out there.

Anyone see any other problems with this approach?