parallels (on external disk?)

[benlee]

Hope someone can help me.... I just got a new externall hdd. connected via firewire 800. I used superduper and placed a copy of my harddrive onto a bootable partition. I rarely use windows but it would be nice to have access to it on my mbp. my question is can i install parallels and windows xp on the external hdd and have it work? do i have to install it on the bootable partition and boot from that? How does this work.. Any help would be great. TIA

 

[robbieduncan]

Parallels works best if you let it use a file on a Harddrive as a virtual harddrive. So yes: you can have your Windows install in a file on a Mac formatted external harddrive and use this with Parallels quite happily.

 

[benlee]

Parallels works best if you let it use a file on a Harddrive as a virtual harddrive. So yes: you can have your Windows install in a file on a Mac formatted external harddrive and use this with Parallels quite happily.

sorry but that is confusing. on the boot partition or the other? or doesnt it matter?

 

[robbieduncan]

sorry but that is confusing. on the boot partition or the other? or doesnt it matter?

You are thinking about this the wrong way: BootCamp requires you to partition your disk and have a real Windows partition. This must be on an internal drive.

Parallels does not require you to partition your drive. It uses a file on an existing partition and makes Windows believe that that file is a partition. So there is no partition to be a boot one or otherwise...

 

[balamw]

Robbie,

Recent versions of Parallels can boot from Boot Camp partitions. Which seems to be what the OP wants to do.

OP,

You may be able to use Parallels Transporter to move the contents of the partition to a file and then use it as Robbie suggests.

B

 

[benlee]

sorry im being really confusing. let me try to be more specific. Thank you guys for trying to help. you guys are great. So, I dont have boot camp. I just have a bootable backup of OSX on my external on one partition and a regular blank partition on the other. I want to try parallels but dont want to install windows on my internal drive. So I want to put it on the external. My question is what partition do i use? does it have to be on the same one as OSX and i have to boot from that? Or can i just put it on the other and open it from there. hope that isnt still confusing.

Robbie,

Recent versions of Parallels can boot from Boot Camp partitions. Which seems to be what the OP wants to do.

OP,

You may be able to use Parallels Transporter to move the contents of the partition to a file and then use it as Robbie suggests.

B

 

[Eidorian]

If you have two partitions on your external drive, I'd put it on your HFS+ one. You can run a Parallels virtual machine off of an external drive. I have mine on an external 300 GB one.

In the Parallels installation wizard for a new virtual machine it should ask where you want to install it. Otherwise dragging the folder that contains the virtual machine from your internal hard drive to your external works as well.