I'm quoting Jim here. I'm a newbie mac user, and I've decided to switch over Mac OSX, but I still need to use several windows-only software for my work. Parallels is a wonderful solution for this: I can access all my windows software through osx, without the need to reboot or anything. But I also have to access windows natively now and then, mostly for games. THe problem is: notebooks' harddrives (I have a 17'' macbook pro) are small (60-80-100 gb, 100 gb in my case) and having two windows installations is quite a pain in the a%%. Not to mention the fact I would have to deal with 3 different operating systems, and install everything I need on all of them (firefox, etc...). THe perfect solution would be having a single 'real' windows XP partition, accessible by both bootcamp and parallels. This would save a LOT of HD space, and a lot of time for installing software twice, etc... My #1 Priority for GA would be to AT LEAST give that as a basic 'vanilla' option: boot from bootcamp partition, and have the user deal with the hardware mismatches or the like, if he wants to go 'parallels+bootcamp' on the same real winxp partition (we could set up and use two different hardware profiles, and select the proper one when booting up windows XP). Later (Parallels 1.1?) you could include an 'auto-setup' which automatically creates two different profiles (native vs parallels) and automatically select parallels one when booting from parallels (the native one will be default, so bootcamp will behave properly automatically). Do you think this can be done before 1.0GA (the first basic "boot from bootcamp partition" option, without any additional support)? I need feedback here, this is *NEEDED* for me
I completely agree with omero above, re: the "boot from bootcamp partition" feature. I realise this is not an easy thing to achieve, but I think someone's already acknowledged that it's not impossible. There's gotta be a way to do it, surely? If you guys at Parallels could make this a high priority, it seems there are many users that would be grateful. Everyone seems to want this feature. Heck, I'll pay twice the $49 for it, right now, if you promise this feature in 1.0.
People needing this feature, please post in the wish list forum thread, to let parallels know our needs http://forums.parallels.com/thread1627.html
