In my previous post I wrote about using Parallels together with a BootCamp partition. Now I decided to save on the 32 GB partition and use its space for my Mac OS related stuff by converting the BootCamp partition into a Virtual Disk one. Actually the steps doing so are very trivial thanks to Parallels Transporter. Here are the steps:
- Boot into the BootCamp Windows partition.
- Download the Transporter package.
- Install the Transporter package (the installer tells you that the Transporter agent is already installed, but with me I could not connect to the Windows partition until I installed the complete Transporter package!).
- Reboot Windows.
- Start Transporter on your Mac OS.
- Select the Windows partition (I had to use the IP address of the BootCamp Windows).
- Wait for a long time (took me about 45 minutes on a MacBook Pro with 3 GB Ram).
- Once done shut down the BootCamp Windows.
Now, test that the Virtual Disk works fine within Paralells and all your applications work (My Oracle and ColdFusion installation still worked fine and Oracle is quite tricky on the Hardware part). If you are sure, you can delete the BootCamp partition. But hold on, don’t just start up Disk Tool and delete the Bootcamp partition, use the BootCamp Assistant.
- Start the BootCamp Assistant.
- Chose to remove the BootCamp partition.
Now, how easy was that to move Windows around and free up a lot of “wasted” disk space?
On a side note, the performance of Windows within BootCamp and Windows as a Virtual Disk is about the same. Actually, I like to have Windows as a Virtual Disk much better, since I can “Frezze” (Pause) Windows and it comes up within a second. Plus it saved me 15GB of space.
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These are excellent instructions, and have worked well so far, but how do I determine what the IP address of my boot camp instance?
Open you browser and go the website of http://www.whatismyip.com or then open the network panel and under support you should also see the ip address of your local windows installation.
Recently I performed a conversion from Boot Camp to Parallels.
Interestingly enough, what I did was as follows:
(1) install Parallels and booted up the Boot Camp partition under Parallels
(2) I then shared a folder from the MacOS partition to the Windows partition
(3) I then installed Parallels transporter into the Windows partition
(4) Parallels transporter was then told to migrate the partition and write the virtual hard drive file out to the shared partition shared out by the MacOS partition
(5) Once this was completed, the Boot Camp partition was shutdown
(6) Parallels was then asserted to boot up the new migrated virtual hard drive file, which was in need of further conversion to "3.0 format", but did convert flawlessly.
(7) Parallels then booted up the converted partition.
" On a side note, the performance of Windows within BootCamp and Windows as a Virtual Disk is about the same."
Not by a longshot… While running windows as a Virtual Disk in either VMWare Fusion or Parallels is ok if all you do is boot up Windows and use notepad - the vast majority of applications are MUCH faster booting Windows natively rather than through virtualization. In fact, nothing that relies heavily on your GPU (Video Card) will work very well through virtualization. I tried Photoshop CS3 in VMWare Fusion, and while it was technically ‘usable’, it felt like I was running it on a Packard Bell 386 instead of a brand new Macbook Pro.
Is it then any faster when you run Windows from the BootCamp instead of the virtual disk image?