Hi, I posted this a couple of days ago on the Transporter forum. It has gotten a lot of views, but no one has answered. I hope I can get some answers here. I am about to take Parallels and its Transporter for a test drive, but I'm confused by a couple of points. I want to create an image of my XP machine and run it under Parallels on my Mac with Leopard. 1) When I run Transporter on my XP machine, according to the Transporter documentation, "Parallels Transporter reads and modifies the system files to make the operating system on the image bootable with Parallels virtual machine." I hope that means that the system files that are modified are the copies that are going into the virtual disk image file. Transporter won't actually be modifying systems files on the source machine, will it? And if it does, will I still be able to boot XP on the source machine after I run the Transporter? 2) I'm planning to use Transporter's Advanced Migration Mode instead of Express mode because I need Transporter to write the files to an external device that has enough disk space to hold my XP image. (My XP drive currently uses about 80 GB and has only 20 GB free, and I assume the virtual disk image written by Transporter will be about 80 GB.) The external drive can't be formatted FAT32 because there's a 2GB or 4GB file size limit. So I think I should format the external drive NTFS. But will the Mac then be able to read the virtual disk image file from the NTFS drive? 3) Finally, when I start Parallels on the Mac and want to point it to the XP virtual disk image for the first time, should I first copy the image file from the external drive to an available partition I've got on the Mac? Or should I point Parallels to the image on the external drive because Parallels is going to create a local image on my Mac boot partition anyway? Thanks very much! . . . Phil
I must admit giving up on transporter way back on version 2.5 ish My old machine has two hard disks both bootable and all my efforts failed so I made a clean new VM (not Bootcamp) Hugh W
Hi Hugh, I successfully Transported yesterday and am now running my familiar WinXP desktop on my second monitor. It took 2 hours to for Transporter to create a 60 GB hdd image file, so for those who think Transporter is stuck, you do have to give it a lot of time. I kept Window's Task Manager open to watch the 2 Parallels processes. They never took more than 2% of CPU, but they were never idle for long. So you just have to be patient. . . . Phil
I'm just about to embark down this same road and am deathly concerned about your item 1 i.e. is Transporter going to modify system files on the corporate setup of my XP laptop? Do you definitively know the answer to this? I am an admin on my PC laptop, but I'm going to have a tough time explaining modified system files to the IT guys if something breaks.
While I'm at it, I have another basic question. I can't sling a firewire cable between my MacBook Pro and the Dell laptop because the Dell doesn't have such a cable. The Transporter documentation also says I can use an ethernet network - does this mean I can just sling an ethernet cable between the two machine i.e. nothing is plugged into any formal network. I only have one live ethernet outlet in my office.
Transporter modifies files only on created image, not on the source system. I protected myself in advance by doing a full disk image copy just in case. But I didn't need to use it. Everything worked fine, but you have to give it a lot of time.
I haven't tried the Ethernet network between the two machines, but it's worth a try. Another alternative (which is what I did) is to write the image to an external drive connected to the PC, then connect the drive to the Mac for image import.
