Parallel questions - newbie

[skinsone]

Hi All, I just purchased my first, and not last Mac, a MacBook Pro - 15" from the Apple Store. It will be arriving next week.

I ordered Parallel and would like to know if I can do the following; I have a legal copy of XP Pro which I can use to install by way of Parallel. I am now using my Sony Viao laptop and have an external USB harddrive attached currently used for backup as well as storage for videos, phones and .doc files. This harddrive came from my tower which I built five years ago, the harddrive is only a year old.

Using Parallel can I wipe out the XP Pro then reformat on the c: drive on the external and re-install XP Pro there vs. partitioning the MBP harddrive to install XP Pro? Does Parallel care what or where the drive is physically to run XP Pro?

Also, harddrive is formatted in NTFS.

Thanxs in advance for any advice, and I am sure I will be reading, posting and learning much more next week

 

[MikeDTyke]

Using Parallel can I wipe out the XP Pro then reformat on the c: drive on the external and re-install XP Pro there vs. partitioning the MBP harddrive to install XP Pro? Does Parallel care what or where the drive is physically to run XP Pro?

Also, harddrive is formatted in NTFS.

Parallels will only run windows from either a parallels disk image or in recent builds a pre-existing bootcamp install.

Damn i'll get this post right eventually. Yes you can create a parallels disk image on the external drive, but it'll first need to be reformatted from NTFS to HFS+. A because Macos can't write to NTFS and secondly using FAT would limit the size of disk image to 2Gigs.


M.

 

[skinsone]

Thanxs Mike for the reply. My MBP and Parallels was shipped this afternoon, scheduled to arrive between Monday and Wednesday. I cannot wait .....