Converting a Parallels Windows 10 PVM to a bootable drive.

[aliennerd]

I had a hunt around for a method to do this without any luck so just went ahead and tried the following and it worked. Sorry if it's a well known, documented method, but I thought I'd share.

Using High Sierra on my Mac Pro 5,1 I launched the Parallels installation of Windows 10 and attached a USB HDD, frustratingly the latest version of Parallels won't see drives installed in the drive bays. I then used the 'Backup & Restore' option to create a full system image on the external drive and then created a System Repair DVD.

I installed a new SSD in one of the drive bays using an Icydock and used Disk Utility to format it with FAT & MBR. Meanwhile I copied the Windows 10 system image from the external drive to an NTFS formatted HDD in one of the other SATA bays (this step may be unnecessary.)

I then removed all my other drives and rebooted from the Windows 10 System Repair DVD. Selected 'Advanced Options' and 'System Image Recovery' and selected the system image on the HDD.

It only took about 5 minutes to restore the image onto the new SSD and upon restart I was able to boot straight into the Windows 10 SSD.

There was a fair bit of activity initially as it updated drivers and devices and I had to reactivate it with the product key. I then installed the Apple software and all seems to be well. I moved the SSD onto an Apricorn Velocity PCI card and am now running it from there.

The only downside I've experienced so far is that the Image Recovery software sandwiched the Windows 10 partition between a system reserved partition and the recovery partition meaning I couldn't use disk manager to extend the OS partition. I used Diskpart to delete the recovery partition and was then able to extend the OS partition to the full size of the SSD.

 

[startergo]

There are many ways to skin the cat. For instance what you can do:
Install Windows in BIOS mode in ESXI machine. Upon the first reboot shutdown the machine. You can mount a VMDK file by using ghost with switch –ad=<image file name>
https://www.symantec.com/connect/articles/converting-image-file-format-gho-vmdk-and-vmdk-gho

ghost32.exe –ad=<image file name>

Once it is mounted it can be used in all ghost operation for instance convert disk to image (gho). If you have HS (non APFS I did not try with APFS) split the drive and format the new partition to FAT32. If you have Paragon NTFS for Mac you can format the partition to NTFS from Mac. Then you can restore tho ghost image to a disk (or partition) of your choice (you might need Windows for that).
There is a faster method using Vbox and mounting a physical drive in Vbox:

This method is called VirtualBox "raw hard disk access." This allows you to mount or boot a secondary hard drive or external USB, for example.
In Max OS X, use the following command:

diskutil list

You'll see a listing of the partitions. Make note of the desired drive in the format of /dev/disk0, /dev/disk1, etc.
Now you can run the command to create the virtual hard drive file that points to your desired physical drive. Ensure that you input the desired names between the arrows and replace the number or pound sign with your desired drive number.

VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename "</path/to/file>.vmdk" -rawdisk /dev/disk#

https://www.serverwatch.com/server-tutorials/using-a-physical-hard-drive-with-a-virtualbox-vm.html
Before the first reboot power down the guest and you can boot normally from that drive and install Windows.