New to mac and parallels

I have a new mac with an 80gig drive, already small. With the preinstalled hardware and music i put on the hard drive it disapears quick. My new mac is replacing a dell laptop with a new 60gig drive. My questions are 1. can i just take the drive from the old laptop put it in a case install parallels and run it from the external drive or 2.does it have to be installed to the drive? If it has to be installed can i install it to the external drive?

Dan

 

I believe Parallels will need to be installed on your boot drive. The disk images (virtual machines) can however be installed and run from external drives.

There was one guy that reported problems doing this. But Parallels people seem to think it works ok. I've never tried it.

Mark

 

I have a portable HD and additional copy of Parallels on order with this exact scenario in mind. That way I can share guest OS's between my desktop and soon to be delivered MacBook.

At a guess, I suspect that linking Parallels installation to the boot drive has something to do with processor virtualisation, or possibly even just protecting the notion of per host machine/volume licensing?

 

Parallels has to be installed on your boot drive because it installs kernel extensions and kernel extensions become part of the OS so they have to be on the boot drive. The only way to install Parallels on an external drive is to boot from the external drive and install it. Uf you then boot from a different drive and try to run Parallels, it won't run because its kernel extensions won't be loaded. The VM can be on a LOCAL external drive, but not a network drive.

 

I was going to comment that the amount of stuff that Parallels installs that has to be on your boot disk is pretty small, but when I looked I found a complete backup copy of my Win98 VM files in ~/Library/Parallels/win98 backup/ weighing in at 2 GBytes. Wonder how that got there? :hmm:

But apart from that, a Parallels installation with the VM stuff on an external drive should not tax your boot drive's space very much.

 

A little clarification...I was/will install parallels on my boot drive i was more concerned with being able to install the 2nd OS. I want to run XP from a drive i already have it installed on, externally. can i do this?

 

Not yet as far as I know. There are still many requests to be able to use Parallels to run a standard XP install from say an external HD. As far as I know you MUST create a virtual machine disk and install XP in that for Parallels to be able to use it.

There were a bunch of people that wanted Parallels to boot their BootCamp partition. That as far as I know is still not possible. However with the newer versions of Parallels they offer 1 click WinXP install.

Mark

 

Help with installation onto external drive!

Sorry to resurrect this thread, but I though I'll ask for any advice from other more experienced users.

Here's my scenario:

1. Installed Parallels onto Mac boot drive.

2. Partinioned external SATA drive as Mac OSX Extended partition and named it 'winxp'. (When the drive mounts onto Mac the mount point looks like this: /Volumes/winxp)

3. Created new virtual disk image (128GB -expanding) and selected the following location for the image: /Volumes/winxp/winxp.hdd

4. Installed New Guest OS (Windows XP) onto the external drive (or at least I though I did)

Everything has been working great, but then I noticed that free space on my Mac significantly reduced, I checked and sure enough it's the actual size of my expanding disk image which is approx. 20GB., so I decided to test, I disconnected my external drive and booted VM - it booted fine, so this means somehow the disk image is located on my Mac, and not on the external drive. So my question, how could that happen? And, how do I make it right? How do I install it onto external drive this time? This wa the entire idea that I'll keep my Mac drive space free of Windows and install all guest OSs I need onto external drive.

Couple of other things:

When I try to browse the external drive I can't find the winxp.hdd on it, although if I use 'Go To Folder...' and type /Volumes/winxp - it shows that it's there. I tried a few times to just copy it to a different location, but everytime I do this, the copying process starts and then just hangs there without ever completing the task.
I also tried to compact and compress this drive with the same result, it starts, but then just hangs without ever completing.

Any ideas what might be wrong?
Thanks.

 

You can't copy a 20G file to an external drive? Strange.

Try this: Create a folder on your external drive, then copy your VM (.pvs and .hdd) to that folder. Then in Parallels, open the new VM, and edit the .hdd location to point to the copy on the external disk. Start the VM. It should work.

Others have installed VMs on external drives, although I don't need it and am too lazy to try it today.

If you are on a laptop, make sure it stays cool enough during the copy. Air circulation under it helps.

 

Thank you joem for the advise, but I tried that too. The same thing - it starts copying, then it stops or freezes somewhere in the beginning, so I can't copy the .hdd for some reason.

Any other ideas? And, why did this happen in the first place, why when I selected the extrernal drive as a location for my .hdd file it ended up on my Mac instead?

 

dismal wrote: "The same thing - it starts copying, then it stops or freezes somewhere in the beginning, so I can't copy the .hdd for some reason."


Try archiving the files (disk image (w/ Disk Utility)zip or stuffit), copy the archive over to the external drive, and unpack it. My guess is that archiving it may not be successful if you can't copy it, but it's worth a try.

 

This really sounds like a problem with the external drive. You might try reformatting it. The reason creation of the .hdd on the external didn't work is probably the same reason you can't copy to it. the inability to copy a file from your local drive to an external is a Mac problem and has nothing to do with Parallels (assuming the VM isn't running when you try the copy).

If reformatting the external doesn't work, I'd suspect a hardware problem.

BTW, journaled Mac OS Extended would have been my format choice.

 

Yes, I'm starting to think the same thing, it's the external drive problem. I succesfully made a zip archive from the .hdd file on a mac, but when I tried to copy it to the ext. drive it stopped as usual right after copying process started. I think I'll make a backup of the archived hdd image over my local network to my other computer, reformat the ext. drive and try to copy to it again.

 

OK, there's definitely something wrong with the ext. drive, but I can't figure out what and why?
I tried to re-partition it in a few different ways, but I still can't copy files to it. After copying about 300-600MB, it just stops as before.
Is there a way to test the drive to make sure it's not faulty? I tried Disk Utility and verified that the drive has no errors. What else can be done?
P.S. If it helps my ext. drive is a eSATA drive.

 

i think i found a problem, my ext. drive has two outs: eSATA and USB. All this time I was using eSATA, which apparently has some dificulties working with Mac OSX. So, as soon as I connected the drive through USB - ti works fine now and I can copy onto the drive. Well, now I need to sort out this eSATA problem...

 

Not strictly true - it won't work on a smbfs network, but I've successfully run my VMs across an NFS network.

 

if the old drive is fat 32 you could but it in a usb 2 or firewire enclosure and mount it as is but not boot or run exe

My 5 year old VAIO has a dead screen and will never be Vista ready so after matching top of the line VAIO against MacBook Pro in JUly 2006 I chose the Mac

I made a blog about it
http://mac-on-intel.blogspot.com/ but there has been very little to say

It took a couple of weeks to learn Parallels
I made and deleted 5 virtual machines until I got the configuration right

I am now sufficiently confident to be beta testing the next versions

1)
best practice now
get an external hard disk or two
copy all your data from the old machine to one and then plug it into the mac

2)
max out memory
this mac has 2 gb


3)
in the future make an image of your old machine using Parallels Transporter
there may be activation issues with Microsoft

I have not got so far with my beta test of that product
and even for a geek beta testing is not wise until you know a good version of a program
and never in a work environment

Keep your old machine intact
I network my two

Hugh W