Hello, First, please forgive me if this sounds like a simple question, but I've checked through support docs and haven't found an answer to what I'm looking for exactly. I've just received a new Mac Pro for use in our studio. I have a primary 500GB drive for my OS X uses and a secondary 250GB I'd like to dedicate for using Windows XP. Using Parallels, is it possible to install XP onto this secondary drive or do I have to partition my primary drive? I'd really like to be able to keep all Windows XP files, etc. on the dedicated secondary drive, but I'm not 100% sure if this is possible? Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, Kristin.
You must install the Parallels application on your boot drive, but that doesn't take much space. You may put your virtual machines anywhere you like. Bootcamp requires a partition, but Parallels doesn't. The disks on your virtual machine are ordinary OSX files. Depending on what you are doing with your guest OS (which can be XP, some other Windows version, Linux, etc.) it may be desirable to put the entire VM on one drive for simplicity, or have more than one virtual disk and put those virtual disk files on different spindles. Some software runs faster if it has scratch space on a disk different from the one with the base data, but this only works if the two drives are on physically different spindles. Putting a scratch area on another partition on the same disk will not speed things up. So what you really want to do depends on what you are using.
