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KwanMan

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 12, 2011
100
0
Right here's my situation. I have a MBP that has windows 7 installed via bootcamp for gaming and another windows 7 VM installed on Parallels for simple tasks. I want to know if there is any way to have only one version of W7 installed that will be able to run via bootcamp when i need all the resources for gaming but also be able to run as a VM in Parallels or VMWare when I just need to quickly run a program in windows? This way I can save some space on my HDD
 
I'm going to say...probably? I use VMware Fusion and that's exactly what it does, it imports your bootcamp partition and you can use it in a vm or boot full blown. I was blown away how awesome that was. You lose some features though like snapshots and stuff like that.

Try looking at creating a new parallels and look for a Bootcamp import option.
 
I know you can do this in Fusion, however be careful with the terminology.

IMPORT - means that fusion copies your bootcamp partition and turns it into a virtual machine. Then the two (the VM and BC) are SEPARATE. They will no longer be in sync and you will run into windows activation issues

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/mi...nguage=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1015088

SHARE - means that you launch fusion, point it toward your BC partition and then boot up windows. So the VM runs the bootcamp partition. (However, you will lose the ability to take snapshots and suspend the VM) This will give you the ability to do what you described that you want to do. Which is run a VM every now and then, and still be able to run your bootcamp partition.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/mi...nguage=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1014618
 
Thanks for the replies, VMWare seems to do exactly what I want. I will check it out
 
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