Boot Camp as VM partition- advice?

I configured Parallels 2.5 with a Boot Camp partition to ensure I could dual-boot if needed. We are running a marine navigation suite of apps that depends e.g., upon an 8 serial port USB interface. It has turned out that everything works fine under Parallels - so far at least.

But the Boot Camp partition seems to cause problems - most commonly that Parallels says it cannot boot from that partition. As I use NetRestore to backup/restore the XP environment I have that ultimate recovery.

My question: is there a straightforward way to migrate the Boot Camp partition to a standard VM? And inversely, if we run into a brick wall and need to migrate the VM to an NTFS "Boot Camp" partition?

 

Well, you can use transporter, people have reported that it works well, although it is not supported for this action. Alternatively you can make a new install with Parallels and restore your old install to it. Acronis True Image has proven itself with this.