I have used Windows 7 on my Mid 2010 MacBook Pro with Bootcamp 4 for several years. I recently upgraded from Win 7 to Win 8 and then Win 8.1 Win 8 worked ok with BC 4 but with Win 8.1 the drivers are completely broken. BootCamp support says my Mid 2010 unit will not update to BootCamp 5 and will not install the new Windows drivers. So what I would like to do is install PD 9. I have plenty of room on my Mac Partition, but I would really like to be able to use the BootCamp Windows partition (250M) so I don't lose that space. Should I recover and convert the Windows Partition to OSX using BootCamp Assistant 4 or can PD 9 create a virtual drive on the Windows Partition without wiping that partition? Obviously the ideal would be for Parallels installed on the OSX side to mount the existing Win 8.1 partition and installation in a VM - but I think that is asking too much.
I am going to answer my own question, being lazy I did not look at the online User Manual before posting. Page 35 says I can virtualize the Boot Camp partition. I am going to download the trial version and give it a try. If it does not work well I will update my post.
Regrettably when PD9 started updating Boot Camp files a message to log into Windows appeared, but the displayed Windows screen was the "disk needs repair screen". Apparently the same issues that keep users from upgrading from BootCamp 4 to BootCamp 5 on mid-2010 MackBook Pros prevented PD9 from updating and installing the Windows partition. I tried to recover the Windows partition with everything short of reinstall Windows using BootCamp, nothing worked.
When I went to the OSX side I could backup files in the Windows partition, I did that, and then deleted the Windows partition. I am now reinstalling Win 8 in a pure PD9 VM.
Last edited: Oct 27, 2013
