Migration Assistant or Parallels to move files

I just purchased a new Imac and will be installing Parallels.
Do I use the Mac migration assistant to move my files or do I use Parallels wizard to do that?

 

Parallels has an utility to move files and apps from your Windows PC to the Mac.

If you are moving from one Mac to another - Migration Assistant from Apple is your way to go.

 

Migration Assistant will not migrate to a Parallels VM !!!

I am thoroughly dissatisfied with the non-resolution to my problem!!! I am trying to migrate a Snow Leopard partition on my iMac to a Snow Leopard VM on my Mountain Lion partition using Migration Assistant on the Snow Leopard VM. As a note, I had no problem migrating my Snow Leopard partition to my Mountain Lion partition using the Mac Migration Assistant. The problem that I have is you cannot run applications that run under PPC, of which I have several!

Unfortunately, Parallels shows the Host hard drives and partitions, including external hard drives, as Shared Folders, not as devices, so Migration Assistant cannot find them. Thus, the way Parallels (NOT Apple) has decided to show these DEVICES as FOLDERS does not allow one to migrate from an old OS to a new OS VM because no internal or external hard disk will show up as a device on the VM. This problem cannot be Apples problem, because all internal and external hard drives show up as devices on the Host Mac OS X systems!!! Apple cannot assist me with this problem because it is a Parallels problem, in that Parallels has decided to represent the hard disks as Shared Folders, not Devices!!!

I am extremely disappointed with Parallels implementation of external disk drives on Mac OS X systems and am considering moving to VMware. I have been a loyal Parallels supporter since Parallels 4.0, but …

Dr. Charles Burton

 

Yes Parallels support of hard disks is kind of dumb in that they tried to make it smart - it adds and enforces completely unnecessary restrictions.

To solve your problem, you need Snow Leopard to appear as a device instead of a Parallels shared folder.

You could try making a Boot Camp type virtual hard disk but for some inexplicable reason, Parallels doesn't let you do that with HFS partitions even though there's no difference in disk handling between partition types. Even if you try to manually create such a Boot Camp type virtual hard disk by editing the DiskDescriptor.xml file, Parallels will display an error message stating the partition type is not supported for Boot Camp.

You can make a disk image copy of your Snow Leopard partition (make a GUID partition disk image and recover the Snow Leopard partition to it) and then mount that in your virtual machine. Migration Assistant will see the mounted disk image.

I know you can create a disk image of your Snow Leopard disk, then convert that to a Parallels virtual hard disk, then add that to your virtual machine's configuration. Instead of converting it to a Parallels virtual hard disk, you can edit the DiskDescriptor.xml file and point it at the img file. That way, you can still mount the img file when you want to edit it as an HFS disk since Parallels Mounter mounts its virtual hard disks using a proprietary file system and doesn't work properly with HFS+ partitions.

Even when you get Snow Leopard copied to your virtual machine, Parallels will probably block it from booting because they are, for some other inexplicable reason, enforcing Apple's end user license agreement which says you can only run server as a virtual machine, or Lion or Mountain Lion even if you own the OS that you're trying to virtualize). You could try getting around that by making a Hackintosh virtual machine. But even then, Parallels might block it before it boots. You could try faking the OS version number to say it's server, but I think Parallels blocks that hack now as well (it might still work with VMWare).

 

Re: Migration Assistant will not migrate to a Parallels VM !!!

Thanks for your input. It helped significantly. While I am unable to migrate the SL partition to my SL VM, I was able to use your suggestion to develop an alternative. After creating a DMG file of the SL partition on my ML partition, I was able to get the SL VM to access the DMG so I could access all the applications on my SL partition and run them. While the DMG does take significant space, it is a small price to pay (I guess) for me to be able to access my old SN system. While I am not able to repartition my disk to recover unused space on my SL partition, I may be able to start all over, erase the disks, remove the partitions, reinstall ML, and recover using Time Machine or a bootable backup of ML.

Again, thanks for your help !!!

 

iPartition can be used to shrink and expand partitions. It will move partitions if necessary. You just need to boot and run it from a different hard drive than the one you're changing. If you don't have an external hard drive or a USB thumb drive to boot from, then you could connect your new iMac to your old Mac using a FireWire cable and boot the new iMac in FireWire target disk mode.

Is the DMG read/write (not compressed)? If so, you could convert it to an expandable Parallels Desktop virtual hard disk which might save space depending on the amount of free space is in the DMG.

You said "SL VM". Does that mean Snow Leopard? I don't think that works as a VM in Parallels. I think you meant "ML VM"?

If you're not booting from the DMG, then what's it's purpose? Why not just copy the files over and get rid of the DMG?

 

I built the DMG R/W and compressed. Compression reduced the size to 2/3 the original.

The VM is SL. There are a couple of ways to build it (with or without SL Server):

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=14799174
http://www.ivanexpert.com/blog/2011/08/snow-leopard-as-a-parallelsvmwarevirtualbox-guest-os/
http://www.ivanexpert.com/blog/2011/08/snow-leopard-as-guest-in-a-virtual-machine-part-two/

Not booting from the DMG, just opening it as a disk so I can run the applications and deal with the old documents. ML will not run PPC-based applications, so I have to have access to SL to run those old apps.

 

What version of Parallels Desktop did you use to build the SL VM?

 

I used Parallels 8. Others have done it with 7.