Using a native NTFS volume for Win 7

Is there any way Parallels can boot and run Window from a dedicated NTFS volume? I can prepare the disk on a Windows machine.

 

I do not have a dedicated Windows disk, but my Boot Camp partition is NTFS formatted and Parallels can use that as the Windows VM source. There is also a way to use an external drive with Parallels 7, so I believe the answer is a definite yes.

You can use the Mac to setup a NTFS disk if you prefer. I believe that you can simply set the hard drive as the location to setup for the emulation and the Windows install disk should let you then format it as NTFS and install Windows onto it. I've not done it this way because I used Boot Camp to set up my hard drive partition and Windows installer formatted it as NTFS.

I use Tuxera NTFS drivers from my Mac and can simply use Disk Utility to format anything as NTFS (USB, hard drives, etc.). I prefer to do as much from the Mac side as possible because I am familiar with the utilities, etc. on it. I can then use Parallels to install to the drive knowing it's already properly formatted as NTFS and also guarantying that my Mac can also read/write to it.