Parrallels and 2nd partition

[lardin]

i am getting my new macbook and first time mac user. I need to use xp once a while for softwares such as matlab, sas, etc, so i decided to get the parrallels. my understanding is that parallels creates a virual drive, and you can store ur data outside of that virual drive(same drive where the mac os is), but my question is: what if ur mac os went wrong one day? you still loss your data, right?

is there a way to create a 2nd partition where u keep ur data from both xp and mac os, this way, you still have u data regardless which system went wrong. I always have at least two partitions when i use my ibm laptop, so in case my xp crashes, i can always retrieve my data.

your inputs are appreciated. thanks.

 

[hodgjy]

Parallels

I run Parallels on my Mac. Paralles creates a file that has all of your Windows information--programs, Windows itself, and your Windows data. Parallels opens this file and loads it into the virtual machine. The virtual machine data file (the parameters you set up as your machine) is a .pvs file and your Windows drive is a .hdd file. These files need to be together for Parallels.app to run. They must be on a Mac OS X drive. So there's no additional partitions or anything like that. All of your Parallels information is stored in your Mac OS X drive.

If you are worried about a crash someday, save a copy of your Parallels configuration files (.pvs and .hdd) on a separate partition or on an external drive. That way when you have a crash, you can copy your backups to your new OS X drive and be back up and running Windows in a few minutes.

If you want to run Windows from a separate partition from OS X, then Bootcamp is what you are looking for.

i am getting my new macbook and first time mac user. I need to use xp once a while for softwares such as matlab, sas, etc, so i decided to get the parrallels. my understanding is that parallels creates a virual drive, and you can store ur data outside of that virual drive(same drive where the mac os is), but my question is: what if ur mac os went wrong one day? you still loss your data, right?

is there a way to create a 2nd partition where u keep ur data from both xp and mac os, this way, you still have u data regardless which system went wrong. I always have at least two partitions when i use my ibm laptop, so in case my xp crashes, i can always retrieve my data.

your inputs are appreciated. thanks.

 

[plinden]

I run Parallels on my Mac. Paralles creates a file that has all of your Windows information--programs, Windows itself, and your Windows data. Parallels opens this file and loads it into the virtual machine. The virtual machine data file (the parameters you set up as your machine) is a .pvs file and your Windows drive is a .hdd file. These files need to be together for Parallels.app to run. They must be on a Mac OS X drive. So there's no additional partitions or anything like that. All of your Parallels information is stored in your Mac OS X drive.

If you are worried about a crash someday, save a copy of your Parallels configuration files (.pvs and .hdd) on a separate partition or on an external drive. That way when you have a crash, you can copy your backups to your new OS X drive and be back up and running Windows in a few minutes.

If you want to run Windows from a separate partition from OS X, then Bootcamp is what you are looking for.

Not true. You can put your VMs on any drive or partition accessible from your Mac, except for SMB network drives (it fails to load the .hdd file if it's on a SMB network). I run my Parallels VMs on an external Firewire drive at home, and on an NFS drive at work. Running from the NFS drive is slower than local but usable.

You could even put them on a FAT32 formatted thumb drive if you had a big enough one.

The .pvs and the .hdd files do not need to be kept together. If you look at the .pvs file, it's in clear text and you can modify the drive location to whatever you want.

 

[lardin]

thank you for the response.

So it sounds like you can indeed backup the .hdd file on another partition. but what about the mac side? do u guys put ur mac os and data on separate drives? thank u.

 

[wiraone]

When I received my new MB Pro last week, I reformatted the whole thing, created three partititons, main partition for MacOSX, second partition for my important documents and third one just for Parallels disk image. I don't know if this is needed, but I'm used to Linux .. and now, if possible, I want to have my home directory in the second partition too.. Have not explore this option though.

Edited: Found this guide, will try it when I got back home:

http://maczealots.com/articles/home/