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Converting a BootCamp Windows installation into a Parallels Virtual Disk Image

by on March 15, 2007 in Apple

In my previous post I wrote about using Parallels together with a BootCamp partition. Now I decided to save on the 32 GB partition and use its space for my Mac OS related stuff by converting the BootCamp partition into a Virtual Disk one. Actually the steps doing so are very trivial thanks to Parallels Transporter. Here are the steps:

  1. Boot into the BootCamp Windows partition.
  2. Download the Transporter package.
  3. Install the Transporter package (the installer tells you that the Transporter agent is already installed, but with me I could not connect to the Windows partition until I installed the complete Transporter package!).
  4. Reboot Windows.
  5. Start Transporter on your Mac OS.
  6. Select the Windows partition (I had to use the IP address of the BootCamp Windows).
  7. Wait for a long time (took me about 45 minutes on a MacBook Pro with 3 GB Ram).
  8. Once done shut down the BootCamp Windows.

Now, test that the Virtual Disk works fine within Paralells and all your applications work (My Oracle and ColdFusion installation still worked fine and Oracle is quite tricky on the Hardware part). If you are sure, you can delete the BootCamp partition. But hold on, don’t just start up Disk Tool and delete the Bootcamp partition, use the BootCamp Assistant.

  1. Start the BootCamp Assistant.
  2. Chose to remove the BootCamp partition.

Now, how easy was that to move Windows around and free up a lot of “wasted” disk space?

On a side note, the performance of Windows within BootCamp and Windows as a Virtual Disk is about the same. Actually, I like to have Windows as a Virtual Disk much better, since I can “Frezze” (Pause) Windows and it comes up within a second. Plus it saved me 15GB of space.

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Simply amazing: Parallels Beta 2, Bootcamp, Windows XP, ColdFusion and Oracle

by on December 23, 2006 in Apple, CFML, Oracle

The other day I mentioned that I am (finally) back on the Mac. Well, today I had some time to finish up installing my MacBook Pro an one of these installations was installing Bootcamp, Parallels and of course Windows XP.

First off, I am truly amazed at the speed of Parallels and the new coherence feature it has. Actually I went so far that I run Photoshop CS3 (MacOSX), Parallels (MacOSX), Updating Windows over Wireless Lan (Windows), downloading a file in FireFox (Windows) and running ColdFusion and Oracle as a service (Windows) and at the same time writing this message in Firefox (MacOSX).

If I had told this someone two years ago, they would have thought that I am cheating but see for yourself:

I would also like to mention that Apple has done a great job with Bootcamp. It was simply a matter of running the Bootcamp Assistant, following the manual, and installing Windows XP. Once back into MacOS X, installing Parallels and using the Custom Installation for choosing the Bootcamp partition. Simple tasks, for an amazing solution.

I have used VMWare Workstation on Windows many times before but it was never so easy to install and use another OS within a Host system. Did I mention that a simple drag and drop copies files back and forth between MacOS X and Windows XP?

Actually with a setup like this, I don’t think there is anything holding anybody back from getting an Apple system anymore.

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