Using Boots Camp's drive on Parallels

[metallic07039]

I used Boot Camp to partition my drive to install Windows XP Pro SP2.

Now that I just installed Parallels im wondering if there is anyway I could get that Boot Camp Windows XP drive as a virtual machine on my Parallels VM Workstation?

Looking forward to your ideas.

[TJCacher]

The Wiki entry containing detailed steps for setting up Windows File Sharing between your Mac and your Parallels Windows VM is a good way to do what you want.

Pay special attention to the part about USB drives, since that is also the technique you will use to get access to your Boot Camp partition.

Basically, after setting up Windows File Sharing, you create a Unix-style hard link (using Mac's Terminal app) somewhere in your home folder. When navigating your home folder from within the Parallels VM (using Window File Sharing), the hard link file will appear to be a folder, allowing you to access the drive that is linked via the hard link.

The hard link will be created to point to /Volumes/XPVolume (or whatever you named your Boot Camp partition).

[thesman]

You mean a symbolic link. You can't create hard links to directories. Another thing you could do would be a bind --mount for that partition.

[anomaly256]

this is fine for viewing the partition inside parallel's find file dialog... but what about accessing the partition as an actual /drive/? parallels only lets you access drive /images/... I think this is what the parent post is referring to

[TJCacher]

this is fine for viewing the partition inside parallel's find file dialog... but what about accessing the partition as an actual /drive/? parallels only lets you access drive /images/... I think this is what the parent post is referring to

I'm not clear on what you mean by "find file" dialog - the technique allows any access to the files on the partition that you would have by using OS X itself.

If you insist on having a drive letter assigned to the partition from within Parallels, you could always use the following steps:

1) Set up Windows File Sharing, and share your OS X home directory for access from within Parallels, according to the instructions in the Wiki.

2) From OS X, create a symbolic link to the Boot Camp partition volume somewhere in your home directory. Let's say your Boot Camp partition is named XPHD. Use this Terminal command, from your home directory:

ls -s /Volumes/XPHD BootcampXP

3) From Parallels->XP, open a cmd window, and use the following command:

subst x: \\MACNAME\USERNAME\BootcampXP

(Replace "MACNAME" above with the name of your mac computer, and USERNAME with your home directory name. This command will assign drive letter x: to your bootcamp partition. Note that, since this is done by Windows File Sharing to Mac OS X, you are actually using OS X to read the Windows partition. If the partition is an NTFS drive, OS X will have mounted it as read-only, since it cannot write to NTFS drives. Therefore, you will only have read-only access in Parallels to the partition.)

I just tried this command, and it is working on my machine to assign drive letter x: to my bootcamp partition from within XP running under Parallels. As stated above, since my bootcamp partition is formatted as NTFS, I am limited to accessing it as read-only from within Parallels using this Windows-File-Sharing-dependent method.

[anomaly256]

This is fine for accessing files. However, I think you're missing the point of having a /partition/ visible under parallels as opposed to a /file system/. Having a partition visible allows you to do neat things like launch /the same/ XP install under both bootcamp dual boot AND parallels without having to have a seperate XP install on a partition and then another in a parallels image wasting hard drive space. Or linux. Or whatever. It's just a much nicer convenience. Also, on the point of linux, the only way to have these files visible to parallels currently would be if parallels saw the partition natively since OSX doesn't seem to be able to read ext2/ext3/reiserfs/jfs/xfs/etc natively

I'm not clear on what you mean by "find file" dialog - the technique allows any access to the files on the partition that you would have by using OS X itself.

If you insist on having a drive letter assigned to the partition from within Parallels, you could always use the following steps:

1) Set up Windows File Sharing, and share your OS X home directory for access from within Parallels, according to the instructions in the Wiki.

2) From OS X, create a symbolic link to the Boot Camp partition volume somewhere in your home directory. Let's say your Boot Camp partition is named XPHD. Use this Terminal command, from your home directory:

ls -s /Volumes/XPHD BootcampXP

3) From Parallels->XP, open a cmd window, and use the following command:

subst x: \\MACNAME\USERNAME\BootcampXP

(Replace "MACNAME" above with the name of your mac computer, and USERNAME with your home directory name. This command will assign drive letter x: to your bootcamp partition. Note that, since this is done by Windows File Sharing to Mac OS X, you are actually using OS X to read the Windows partition. If the partition is an NTFS drive, OS X will have mounted it as read-only, since it cannot write to NTFS drives. Therefore, you will only have read-only access in Parallels to the partition.)

I just tried this command, and it is working on my machine to assign drive letter x: to my bootcamp partition from within XP running under Parallels. As stated above, since my bootcamp partition is formatted as NTFS, I am limited to accessing it as read-only from within Parallels using this Windows-File-Sharing-dependent method.

[TJCacher]

This is fine for accessing files. However, I think you're missing the point of having a /partition/ visible under parallels as opposed to a /file system/. Having a partition visible allows you to do neat things like launch /the same/ XP install under both bootcamp dual boot AND parallels without having to have a seperate XP install on a partition and then another in a parallels image wasting hard drive space. Or linux. Or whatever. It's just a much nicer convenience. Also, on the point of linux, the only way to have these files visible to parallels currently would be if parallels saw the partition natively since OSX doesn't seem to be able to read ext2/ext3/reiserfs/jfs/xfs/etc natively

Thanks for your reply. After I had posted the technique above, it actually did occur to me that the functionality being requested was for Parallels to be able to use the Bootcamp partition natively, possibly even for booting off of.

I don't have a link, but there is a thread on the Parallels.com forums beta support forum asking for that same functionality. It's been a while since I read it, but I think I recall the Parallels people replying that they would take this request under advisement. I think they felt like it would be a pretty major change from the way their product is designed. But they seem to have been pretty responsive to other requests, so perhaps we'll see that capability at some point.

This also appears to present a non-trivial issue for XP itself, in that there are driver-level differences between the Parallels virtual machine and the actual Mac hardware, and I'm not sure that XP is designed to accomodate a single OS copy being booted on disparate "hardware".

This point was brought home more forcefully to me when I attempted to "activate" my copy of XP Pro under Parallels that I had previously activated under Bootcamp. I was directed to make a phone call, and only got an activation code from Microsoft after carefully explaning that the two different "machines" I was installing my copy of XP on were actually the same physical machine, once on the actual hardware, and once under a virtual machine environment. They didn't really give me any trouble once they understood - it's just that it was clear that the Windows activation scheme had not been written anticipating such a possibility.

I think it's quite conceivable that Microsoft might argue that such dual use infringes the license agreement, even on a single machine, but fortunately they didn't choose to make me the test case for this argument.

Running XP from the same physical partition under one of two possible architectures, one real and the other virtual, would appear to cloud the license issue even further.

[anomaly256]

The differences between the actual hardware and what parallels presents can be easily managed using 'hardware profiles' under xp. I've had to do this before on vmware setups. Granted, activation can still be an issue in such cases :P

To be honest though, I would be using this just as much for the gentoo linux partition I have on here as for the xp partition. ("Oh look, updated gnome/kde/kernel is released, I'll just fire up parallels and run 'emerge -u world' without stopping this shake compositing for work in order to reboot", etc. OK, maybe I am just being fussy, but seriously, this would be so damn handy for me, and others too I'm sure) :)