new virtual machine from real HD

I want to make a parallels virtual machine from the contents of a hard drive.
The hard drive is an IDE hard drive in my hand. It has windows XP installed on it. The computer that it came from is very dead. (I have a usb to ide adapter so attaching the real drive to an other real computer is no problem.)

I have been trying to figure out some way to do this for about 7 to 9 hours now. So if someone tells me to google it I will stick an emulated Javelin in their virtual eye.*

I started out thinking that it should not be difficult to make a disk image of the drive, associate that image with a virtual machine, and repair windows so that it will boot the new virtual machine.

I can make a dmg of the drive but there is no way, as far as I have seen, to convert a dmg to the required hdd format.
Every form and post describing some, always convoluted, method of accomplishing the task of making a .hdd from a physical disk seems to be incomplete or rely on software that doesn't exist any more or who's current version no longer has the feature needed to accomplish this task.

I am using Parallels 4.

*Any help will be appreciated
-Joshua

 

I'm having a similar problem. I have the hard drive for an old Windows 98 machine, and was able to connect it to my Mac and create a DMG for it.

I used Parallels Transporter 4 to import it, and successfully created the HDD file. But when I created a virtual machine and point it to either the HDD file or the original DMG file, it says the drive is not bootable even though there is an operating system on it.

I then upgraded to Parallels 5, but have the same problem. Both the DMG and HDD files are fine and mount on the desktop with no problems, but they won't boot.

What could I have done wrong? Was the DMG file not properly created? What can I do to make either one of them bootable?

Thanks for any help,
Alfie

 

Hmmm, add me to the list of people with a "disk in the hand" wanting to import into Parallels ...

 

Yep, add me too. Several old system disks in hand and wondering how to turn them into virtual machines for Parallels 5.

Anyone?