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Possible to have XP and Vista and use Parallels?

J

Jmx

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 13, 2006
76
0
Hi,

Is it possible to have XP and Vista installed on one HD and then acces them from Parallels in OS X?

When i first tested making 2 partitions on my windows HD and installed XP on one partition and tried accessing it from parallels in OS X it said it couldn't because the HD has more than one partition.

Thanks
 
Ive tried Vmware it's the same thing.. it can't find any bootcamp to use :mad:
 
My brother-in-law had this issue with Parallels. Their website said at the time that you can use it with a Boot Camp installation, but didn't make any caveats. He has a Mac Pro, and had Windows installed on a separate internal drive, not just a partition. Parallels refused to see the drive. He finally got Parallels to refund his purchase price, as they gave in that it wasn't possible.

It appears that Parallels only supports one single Boot Camp partition on the primary hard disk. If you have any other setup, it won't work.
 
Parallels works fine nowdays with Windows on a single drive.. i have Mac pro and use a 250 gb hd in slot 4 and Parallels finds XP instantly and it works fine.. even Vmware Fusion does that.
But now i've formated the same hd and made 2 partitions XP/Vista and was hoping that i could boot them in Parallels aswell... but so far no luck with either of Parallels or Vmware.
 
Vista 64 bit to be able to use 5gb ram and gaming
XP for combability with things.. but XP can only use 2gb ram.
 
This is almost on-topic but I don't know if you all can help. I have a PC now running XP and I'm waiting for the updated Mac Pros to come out. When I get the MP, could I move my present XP hard drive over to the MP and use Parallels to access and run my old copy of Windows or do I have to reinstall it all again from scratch?
 
thxdave: I'm not sure about Parallels, but if you use VMWare Fusion, you can just download the free VMware converter from their site. Run the program and it will convert your entire machine to a virtual machine.

Just beware that this can really suck up your disk space, so while it's great for the initial conversion, after a couple of weeks you may want to do a fresh install of XP that only includes the things you really need since you'll find Mac native replacements for most apps.

I converted my Toshiba laptop's installation with everything on the harddrive (all 90 gig) to a VM. Then I moved all my media and data over the OSX on my MBP. Now I find I'm only using XP for Web applications that require IE (necessary for work). There's no reason to keep around my 90 gig virtual disk for that when a five gig (or smaller) one will do.

So, you can convert your existing install and it really helps with the initial conversion, but after a few days, you'll probably want a new install anyway without all the apps and other detritus you don't use anymore.
 
Only VMWare will work with 64 bit Vista.

I tried it. It works on my system, but caveats:

1) It goofs up the display driver on your boot camp installation. You have to reinstall the video driver.

2) Plan to spend quality time with Microsoft on the phone to get a second activation.

I decided I was better off just maintaining two separate installations, XP 32 bit with Parallels inside OSX and Vista x64 outside of it. Parallels seems to work a tad better than VMWare.
 
ehurtley said:
It appears that Parallels only supports one single Boot Camp partition on the primary hard disk. If you have any other setup, it won't work.
Click to expand...
VMWare Fusion 1.0 and later (so, all shipping versions but not all of the pre-release beta versions) supports any Boot Camp partition on any drive. However, it didn't always automatically find it depending on where it was stored in version 1.0. The current version 1.1 seems to always find all the Boot Camp partitions.

Also, now that Macs with NTFS read/write support in OS X are becoming more common (with open source NTFS-3G or commercial Paragon NTFS), for safety VMWare Fusion 1.1 also automatically dismounts a Boot Camp NTFS partition when booting from it in a VM and then remounts it in OS X after shutting the VM down.
 
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