Boot Camp partition install or no?

I'm going to be doing a fresh install of leopard and parallels on my machine. I can either install windows through boot camp and install parallels over that or just install windows through parallels. As you can guess I don't have much use for boot camp on it's own, I just need to run a few widows applications (Quickbooks and Office since the mac versions are awful).

I've run parallels for a couple of years. In the past I've done a boot camp windows install then installed parallels, but I've had corruption problems twice. I don't want to get into the corruption issues here because i've already found work-arounds. Is windows more stable if you install it straight through parallels without boot camp? Any thoughts or experiences?

 

Hi,

Have been using the same parallel windows xp machine for a couple of years now. It is not a bootcamp based machine and I have had no issues with it.

I have however always turned off the virtual machine when not in use and have disabled any kind of file sharing or application sharing. My windows XP VM is a completely isolated machine who uses the net only when I want to run the windows update process.

 

Does Parallels recommend one way over another? I've looked all over to see if it was better to install over a bootcamp partition or without using bootcamp.

Thanks for your response Frederic. I think that's the way I'll go unless I hear otherwise.

 

Hello,

It is usually recommended to have Windows installed on Boot Camp and to create Parallels Virtual Machine which will load this Windows directly from Mac, so you would not need to reboot the whole computer to access Windows partition.

It is better because of several reasons - first of all, you will be able to run several applications which are not supported by virtual machines. Also, the performance is better (with VM under Boot Camp), as you operate with a real hardware (at least one emulation level is excluded, so less resources are needed) ect.

Moreover, you would not need to reinstall anything on Windows if the VM is occasionally corrupted. When starting your virtual machine you will have exactly the same configuration as you have in your BootCamp.

Please, find more information about creating a BootCamp-based virtual machine in Parallels Desktop User Guide:

http://www.parallels.com/download/file/doc/Parallels_Desktop_for_Mac_User_Guide.pdf

on the page 20 and instructions for creating such a machine starting from the page 266.

 

Thanks. That makes perfect sense.

 

I imagine, though, if you actually boot the Boot Camp partition in parallels (and don't take the "data disk" option), a corrupt VM is going to corrupt booting Windows via boot camp.

A risk I am willing to take.

 

Actually I prefer the VM, because I can take a copy of the VM and put it on an external disk. My disk file is fixed in size and therefore is a little bi faster then an expanding one.

I have never, ever had a corupt VM windows XP machine. And this baby has been running for 4 years now thru at least 2 major parallel updates and a bundle of beta test versions.

It has also moved 3 times to 3 different external hard disk, the latest one being a mini-g plugged on a firewire 800 connection.

I have even run that VM off my hard drive which is connected on my airport extreme base thru a wireless link on 802.11 and it worked surprisingly well.