Parallels and Win7/SL Dual boot

[knew know]

I've been trying to get Parallels 5 working using my existing Windows 7 install on a separate partition, but as we know, Parallels isn't designed to be looking at any pre-existing windows installs other than the bootcamp ones. Is there any way to force it to look at my Windows 7 partition and treat it as a bootcamp one?

 

btw.. my partition setup is as follows:

Disk1 Partition 1 - Windows 7

Disk2 Parititon 1 - Snow Leopard 10.6.2

Snow Leopard disk is running as MBR.

 

On another quick note... any recommendations for Vmware over Parallels? I've been hearing great things about Parallels 5 in terms of performance gains over VMware 3.0. Anyway....

 

Thanks,

 

kk

[umano]

I would like to do the same thing, but i have w7 on another disk.

I know that vmware has a converter from partition to virtual image... so it should not be possible to virtualize a win partition directly, i think

[flantee]

I see.

 

So if I have Win7 on a different partition, I have to use VMWare Workstation to create a Virtual Machine from my existing partition. Am I correct to say thatParallels is useless in this case?

 

Thanks for any info.

[shortfinger]

Thanks for the thread.

 

Any ideas about parallels desktop 5?

 

How can i use my real win7 on iatkosv7?

[Iyerit]

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php...t&p=1363558

 

That describes how I got it working.

[shortfinger]

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php...t&p=1363558

 

That describes how I got it working.

 

Thanks for reply.

 

But I don't understand what you did. Can you explain simply?

 

 

And which one should i select?

[Iyerit]

Probably the one that involves partitions and not CDs/DVDs. It doesn't matter if you've even used Boot Camp at all or not, it just looks through your (mounted!) partitions and finds one that has a Windoze install. If you have more than one install of win, then unmount/eject all the other win partitions other than the one that has the install you want to virtualize.

And yes, you will need to reactivate Windoze within Parallels. MS activation reps have been known to accept the "virtualizing a physical install on the same machine" story in the past, but their management says doing that with the same license is a violation of the EULA (because clearly it isn't running on the exact same hardware on the exact same machine in the end, is it?!?). Nothing stopping you from bull{censored}ting a story though.

[starobrno1]

First Parallels compared to Fusion well Parallels wins easy, I tried them both but bought Parallels. I´m running win xp as guest os but as I understand it you will get even better performance regarding graphics with win 7. The ways they make it possible to integrate win apps with osx is really cool. In my mind this is pretty much as seamless as you get, today anyway.

 

From what I understand an already installed virtual mashine should be possible for Parallels to find. Not sure how it is with an actuall "real" partition the bootcamp way though, on the ohter hand I can´t really see the use of it if you´re running osx on PC hardware. Seems so much easier to just dualboot.

 

I´m running SL 10.6.2 and Paralells with win xp as guest on a GA EP45-DS3, q6600 cpu, got two videocards and it works just great. I can even run my old pc app emagic Logic with a bunch of pretty heavy plugins loaded to a song and it playsback pretty ok. Recording audio works not so good though you get lots of latency. But all in all that it actually works at all is amazing. Working with multiple soundstreams and processing them in realtime is pretty heavy to get working in a virtualised environment even in playback mode.

 

Running win xp virtualised just doing the normal everyday stuff like running microsoft office apps etc etc to me well I hardly notice any difference at all compared to the real thing.

 

Win xp virtualised sees my networkcard, soundcard, printer, dvd etc etc no problem at all.