Importing Windows drive into Parallels 16

[imrazor]

After having a pretty good experience running Parallels on my shiny new M1 MacBook Air, I decided to try the virtual machine out on my MacPro5,1. But I've hit a snag. Because Apple no longer supports Boot Camp or Windows 10 on this particular Mac, I've had to do a 'normal' install of Windows. And Parallels refuses to touch it, either to boot it up as is or to import it.

There is an option to import Windows off an external drive, but I don't want to have to my Mac apart and stuff the drive in an enclosure just so Parallels can get to what is already in my flipping Mac. Is there any way to force Parallels to recognize the Windows drive, and either boot it directly or copy it into a new VM?

 

[MaryRal]

Hi, did you get any specific error message during the Windows installation? Could you share any details of this issue please?

 

[imrazor]

I'm not installing Windows - I'm trying to copy an existing Windows installation into a Parallels VM. I'm getting errors like:

The Boot Camp partition "/dev/disk0s3" used by Hard Disk 1 is not supported. Please open the virtual machine configuration and select a supported Boot Camp partition in the Hard Disk 1 settings.

Then I got a clue: the installer kept mentioning a third partition when I would've sworn there only two. Sure enough when I ran "diskutil list" there was a third partition with some label ID that MacOS was choking on. I rebooted into Windows and this mystery partition was marked as a 'recovery' partition at the end of the drive. I just deleted it, and was able to import it into Parallels. Even so, Parallels balked quite a bit at adding it, however I eventually made it a bootable VM.

Now the only problem I face is that when running in a VM, Windows refuses to activate. It's perfectly happy when it's running on bare metal. It always seems to be something...