Why can't PD4 leave my BC partition alone??

[Richard Corris]

I am going to use Boot Camp and Apple's BC Assistant, and a copy of Vista x64, to setup a Boot Camp partition with Vista x64 on it that I do NOT want as a VM in Parallels. I'll use a copy of XP Pro as my VM in PD4.

I get to read the Apple BC manual and it says ideally you should setup the BC partition first and install Windows on it. I read the Parallels manual and it says when you install PD4 if there is a BC partition with windows on it then PD4 will create a VM using that BC partition and windows os because there is no other VM yet. I do NOT want Parallels to do that at all. I want to feed it the XP Pro disk and have it leave my BC partition with Vista the heck alone! Is this possible and if so how? If it isn't I just will not bother with Parallels.

Thanks
RC

 

[Angel Garcia]

PD creates a BootCamp-based virtual machine unpon installation, but it doesn't touch your BC partition unless you start that VM or change its configuration. So you can just delete it before doing anything else, then create your own virtual machines.