I presently have a copy of XP Home in my existing VM, however, over time I have moved a lot of files and folders over to the Mac side, and thus require a much smaller VM. My present VM is set at 60GB, but all I require is 30. Due to the recent upgrade to 10.5 and the Parallel incompatibility issues, I thought that perhaps a brand new VM with XP may resolve some of the issues. Plus, as you know, Windows get's messed up over time (a year now), and a clean install probably wouldn't hurt. What I would like to do is keep my existing VM for the time being, install a second VM configured to 30GB, fresh install of Windows XP, re-install all of my existing windows software on the new VM and then copy my files onto the new VM. Having the existing VM on my computer would allow me to keep working in the existing Windows VM until the new one gets put together. Can this be done, or will there be a problem with the install of a second copy of Windows (same installation disk) on the same machine?
Unless you need BootCamp there is nothing difficult about this at all. I have three VMs on my laptop. Linux, Office Disk Image, and Personal Install. Just select to create a new virtual machine from the Parallels menu. Your only problem is the potential shortage of disk space.
Thanks for the response. I have 111GB of space left, but it is my intention to get rid of the existing 60GB VM (which is actually using 77GB because of a goof up I made with Partition Magic), so in the end I will recover about 47GB, back up to 158. My concern actually was with Microsoft thinking I am installing my Windows on more than one machine.
Ahh. Well technically speaking M$ only allows the OS to be installed on one location at a time. There is nothing implemented in the VM to stop that, but that is the law.
