Creating Custom BootCamp Configurations

Creating Parallels Custom Boot Camp configuration may be helpful in case Parallels Desktop is not able to determine what partition must be considered as a default "Boot Camp" partition. It may happen, for example, if Parallels has found more than one matching partition. "Custom Boot Camp" configuration also allows the user to use several partitions in one virtual machine.

A "Custom Boot Camp" configuration is created with the help of Parallels Desktop GUI (OS Installation Assistant or Add Hardware Assistant) and manual editing of the VM configuration (*.pvs) file. With either assistant create a virtual machine with the required number of virtual disks then edit the configuration file.

The following fragment of a configuration file (*.pvs) contains two hard disks definitions in the IDE devices section (the virtual machine has two virtual disks):

Code:

[IDE devices]

Disk 0:0 enabled = 1
Disk 0:0 = 1
Disk 0:0 media = 0
Disk 0:0 connected = 1
Disk 0:0 image = disk.hdd
Disk 0:0 cylinders = 65016
Disk 0:0 heads = 16
Disk 0:0 sectors = 63
Disk 0:1 enabled = 1
Disk 0:1 = 1
Disk 0:1 media = 0
Disk 0:1 connected = 1
Disk 0:1 image = disk2.hdd
Disk 0:1 cylinders = 65016
Disk 0:1 heads = 16
Disk 0:1 sectors = 63
Disk 1:0 enabled = 0
Disk 1:0 = 0
Disk 1:1 enabled = 0
Disk 1:1 =0 

To replace a standard virtual disk definition by definition of a “Custom Boot Camp disk†do the following:
* change the media value to ‘1’
* replace the image value ‘disk.hdd’by a string in the following format:

Boot Camp;diskNsA;diskNsB;diskNsC and so on, where DiskNsY is the BSD name of a disk partition to be used in context of a “Custom Boot Camp diskâ€.

NOTE: To learn the BSD name of a partition use, for example, the console command "mount"
WARNING: Do not use partitions from different physical disks in one “Custom Boot Camp" disk. (Parallels displays an error message)
WARNING: Do not use the same partition in two "Custom Boot Camp" disks in one configuration file (Parallels displays an error message)

For example, we want to convert both of the virtual disks to "Custom Boot Camp disks". We want the first "Custom Boot Camp disk" to include the partition disk0s3 from disk0, the second - two partitions from disk1: disk1s1 and disk1s2. After editing, the fragment will look like the one below:

Code:

[IDE devices]

Disk 0:0 enabled = 1
Disk 0:0 = 1
Disk 0:0 media = 1
Disk 0:0 connected = 1
Disk 0:0 image = Boot Camp;disk0s3
Disk 0:0 cylinders = 65016
Disk 0:0 heads = 16
Disk 0:0 sectors = 63
Disk 0:1 enabled = 1
Disk 0:1 = 1
Disk 0:1 media = 1
Disk 0:1 connected = 1
Disk 0:1 image = Boot Camp;disk1s1;disk1s2
Disk 0:1 cylinders = 65016
Disk 0:1 heads = 16
Disk 0:1 sectors = 63
Disk 1:0 enabled = 0
Disk 1:0 = 0
Disk 1:1 enabled = 0
Disk 1:1 = 0

NOTE: IDE channel (0:0, 0:1, 1:0 and 1:1) has NOTHING with Boot Camp configuration. It just lets the Virtual Machine know which virtual IDE channel to connect the virtual HDD to. Do not change it!

 

Custom Editing

What program are you using to manually edit the *.pvs file. When I use Microsoft Word, making sure that it doesn't perform any formating and leaves everything in *.txt format, Parallels is unable to recognize the edited file.

Thanks and regards,
Vince

I would also like to add that this wasn't a problem with previous versions of Parallels. So hopefully this can be easily corrected within the Parallels UI or be completely avoided in the final release.

 

use textedit in the applications folder on the mac side

 

This is exactly what I was waiting for. Boot Camp and Parallels now play nice on my manually partitioned system.

Thank you so much for the great development work! Every version seems to blow the previous away.

 

THANK YOU!

Now my purchase of your product is 100% assured!

Been waiting for this for a while, so glad to see it finally included.

 

1) This thread should be sticky.

2) This is a very poor solution. Yes, it works, but virtual disk numbers in the disk/slice combination are dynamic and will change often. So, what you are suggesting requires the user to perform a crap shoot everytime they reboot and want to launch Parallels. Because you dismount the Boot Camp drive to use it in Parallels, it's reattached when you reboot the computer (or yes, can be done manually at a shell). I am seeing new disk numbers appear after almost every reboot when a Boot Camp partition was used in Parallels. Thus, when I reboot and try to launch Parallels again I see a message: Unable to open disk image Boot Camp;diskNsN!

It's nice to see a "workable solution" for the text-editing motivated, Boot Camp using crowd, but I hope you can come up with a better solution for this then requiring users to re-edit the config file everytime OS X decides to change the virtual disk address. Again, these DO change often.

Suggestions:

1) Rather than an error message, pop-up a window that let's the user select the correct Boot Camp drive/partition.

2) Create a guid/serial file the 1st time the user successfully boots the Boot Camp partition (c:\parallels.id contains 2039u2503847538450924 and matches a key/pair in the pvs file), then if an error occurs because the drive/slice has changed prompt the user for permission (with a checkbox that says, "don't ask again") to iterate through the available disks looking for the one with the "Name" and the parallels.id file in the base directory of the disk. If the name and the serial id file you created are found on one of the available LOCAL disks, then there is a high probability that is the correct drive. If the iterative search fails, resort to #1 asking the user to explicitly identify the correct partition/slice.

 

BSD Disk Slices

This is not true! BSD disk slices only change when you do something dramatic like repartition under Disk Utility or Computer Management / Disk Management under XP.

Remember that the GUID partition table is emulating a MBR partition table and thus you are limited to 4 primary partitions; further EFI appears to use diskNs1, so only diskNs2, diskNs3 and diskNs4 are available on any give physical disk. You can only really see the partitions running natiive Boot Camp, if you care.

As an aside, I had to delete my Boot Camp VM created by RC1 and recreate under RC2, then edit it in a unix editor pico/vi/emacs [in order of increasing difficulty]. It worked perfectly thereafter.

 

Would this solution work for a Boot Camp partition with Vista?

 

I edited the original message to be more explicit since the slice refers to the partition and is relatively static. Specifically, I meant disk numbers and while the slice part does not change, the disk numbers DO without explicit (what you call dramatic) user action like adding a disk or reformatting (Example: rebooting after launching the Boot Camp partition.) The original post stands --- this is a problem for the reasons specified and needs to be addressed.

 

I can't get this to work, and I don't think I have a strange setup. I have one Boot Camp partition on my internal drive and two partitions on an external (one FAT32 and one NTFS). When I use "mount" in Terminal they come up as:

/dev/disk0s3 on /Volumes/Untitled (local, read-only)
/dev/disk3s1 on /Volumes/SEADISKFAT (local, nodev, nosuid)
/dev/disk3s2 on /Volumes/SEADISKNTFS (local, nodev, nosuid, read-only)

Parallels doesn't recognize disk3s1 or disk3s2 when I add them to the .pvs file. Do I need to know the precise number of cylinders, heads, etc. in order for it to work? I can't get Parallels to work with my Boot Camp partition even if I unmount the external drive and have only the Boot Camp partition in my .pvs file (i.e., a standard Boot Camp Parallels setup). It just says it can't determine which partition is the boot partition - but I only have one Boot Camp partition on my internal drive!

 

I got a new WD My Book 500 gig Firewire/USB2 external backup drive yesterday and partitioned it for my 24"iMac in two partitions (DOS and journaled HFS+). I ran into the Parallels "two boot camp volumes" issue even though there is no bootable OS on the backup drive. What is also interesting is that (now that I have successfully hacked the Parallels config file so that I could even run your fine program) while connected by firewire the external drive doesn't show up in Parallels!

Still, great beta - running Parallels off just a single XP installation is perfect for me and induced me to buy the program the first day you released a beta that worked from my Boot Camp partition and didn't force me to reauthenticate to Microsoft after each boot. Glad to not have to turn off my external HD and reboot in order to get Parallels to run (which sort of negates the whole point of Parallels vs. just Boot Camp itself).

 

I tried this and it did not work. Is it because the macbook pro hdd is formatted as MBR? My windows and os x partiitons work fine otherwise.

 

Please help

I have a Mac Pro with OS X in the first drive bay(1 out of 4) and a separate hard drive in drive bay 2 out of 4 with Windows running via bootcamp.

This is the entry from my pvs file pertaining to IDE devices:

[Ide devices]
Disk 0:0 enabled = 1
Disk 0:0 = 1
Disk 0:0 media = 1
Disk 0:0 connected = 1
Disk 0:0 image = Boot Camp
Disk 0:0 cylinders = 0
Disk 0:0 heads = 0
Disk 0:0 sectors = 0
Disk 0:1 enabled = 1
Disk 0:1 = 2
Disk 0:1 media = 1
Disk 0:1 connected = 1
Disk 0:1 image = Default CD/DVD-ROM
Disk 1:0 enabled = 0
Disk 1:0 = 0
Disk 1:1 enabled = 0
Disk 1:1 = 0

this is the output of the mount command

/dev/disk0s2 on / (local, journaled)
devfs on /dev (local)
fdesc on /dev (union)
<volfs> on /.vol
/dev/disk1s2 on /Volumes/Untitled (local, read-only)
automount -nsl [121] on /Network (automounted)
automount -fstab [187] on /automount/Servers (automounted)
automount -static [187] on /automount/static (automounted)

--------------------------

someone please tell me what the IDE devices section of my pvs file should look like. I'll check this board but please also e-mail amit at greathills.com.

Thanks to whoever can get this up and running for me.

 

Any sucess from anyone? If so, please keep us posted...

I got exactly the same problem..got my bootcamp partition in my internal HD, but it gives me the "This is not a standard Boot Camp configuration" error. Tried unmouting my external HDD, but still the same error.

-----

Edit: Things were not working when I simply unmounted my external HDD, but after unplugging the cable things got better. Now I managed to start my bootcamp installation from Parallels

 

Custom Configuration

Sorry I cannot find the method of editing this file to even start the process.

Please advise are Parallels working on a GUI way of fixing this problem?

 

On my case I didn't have to edit the file, simply disconnecting the external HD solved. Did you try that?

 

Yes that worked. Thanks. Can you reconnect your external HDD?

Now I have no internet connection on the Virtual Drive!?

 

This worked like a charm for me! I have a Mac Pro with 4 drives and decided to install Vista last night to try on another Windows partition alongside my XP install. The only thing that surprised me was that Vista replaced the bootloader on the XP partition (without telling me it was doing so), so I have to select "Previous Windows Version" at the Vista boot loader screen in order to get XP to boot. I have yet to try using my Vista partition with Parallels, only because in the user guide it says specifically to only use XP boot camp partitions.

I'm sure that this process will be refined further, if not in the final release, in a beta shortly after that. Besides, Apple doesn't even officially condone triple-booting via Boot Camp (it's possible, but not mentioned anywhere) so for those like me who are tinkering anyway this is a relatively painless fix, compared to what I thought I might be in for.

As far as fixing it goes, my .pvs file originally looked like this...

Code:

-- snip --
Disk 0:0 connected = 1
Disk 0:0 image = Boot Camp
Disk 0:0 cylinders = 0
-- snip --

And the output of "mount" was:

Code:

/dev/disk0s2 on / (local, journaled)
devfs on /dev (local)
fdesc on /dev (union)
<volfs> on /.vol
-- other drives --
/dev/disk1s3 on /Volumes/Untitled (local, read-only)
/dev/disk2s3 on /Volumes/BOOTCAMP (local)
-- ... --

Where "Untitled" is the Vista NTFS partition and "BOOTCAMP" is the XP FAT partition. So, I changed my .pvs file to read:

Code:

-- snip --
Disk 0:0 connected = 1
Disk 0:0 image = Boot Camp;disk2s3
Disk 0:0 cylinders = 0
-- snip --

And fired up Parallels and it's working great =).

Maybe that'll help some of those who aren't sure what to add to the .pvs file...

 

It's still not working

Hi guys,

I can't say that I am a highly technical person. I have tried what has been outlined on this forum, but for me, it still doesn't work - I am getting the error "Unable to open disk image Boot Camp;disk0s3!"

According to my "mount" command, the details of my partitions are:

Code:

/dev/disk0s2 on / (local, journaled)
devfs on /dev (local)
fdesc on /dev (union)
<volfs> on /.vol
/dev/disk0s3 on /Volumes/WINDOWS XP (local)
automount -nsl [239] on /Network (automounted)
automount -fstab [243] on /automount/Servers (automounted)
automount -static [243] on /automount/static (automounted)

I have changed my .pvs file which shows

Code:

[IDE devices]
Disk 0:0 enabled = 1
Disk 0:0 = 1
Disk 0:0 media = 1
Disk 0:0 connected = 1
Disk 0:0 image = Boot Camp;disk0s3
Disk 0:0 cylinders = 0
Disk 0:0 heads = 0
Disk 0:0 sectors = 0
Disk 0:1 enabled = 1
Disk 0:1 = 2
Disk 0:1 media = 1
Disk 0:1 connected = 1
Disk 0:1 image = Default CD/DVD-ROM
Disk 1:0 enabled = 0
Disk 1:0 = 0
Disk 1:1 enabled = 0
Disk 1:1 = 0

but I still get the same error. What else do I need to do to make this thing work??

 

Still waiting for MBR disk support .... I don't see why it can't be done.