Hello, I was wondering if there's any way, even if that means manually configuring files, to boot Windows in Parallels using an ntfs partition on an external, firewire hard drive. Indeed, my macbook internal hard drive is too slow, so I'd like to boot Parallels VM from an external, 7200rpm firewire drive : I could do so very easily by putting a virtual disk file on that disk... but that would be way too easy and thus not fun enough. Nah, seriously, the problem is : if I do it that way, the files put on that virtual disk couldn't be accessed from, say, a desktop PC when I'd plug the external hdd in. So I'd like to install XP on a classical ntfs partition on the external drive, and boot that XP from Parallels. Is this possible and if yes, how ? Thanks. Liam128.
Well, I am sure that it is possible... I don't know how practical though.. I don't know how to do it either.
Windows XP cannot boot from an external hard drive, as far as I know. This is a limitation of Windows XP. So forget it.
Actually yes, it can, some did, tho it might be necessary to fiddle quite a bit. And I think it would be even more possible with a VM : Indeed, Windows has a weird way to boot external devices at boot... But obviously, in this case, it wouldn't be Windows handling the hard drive : it would be Mac OS X and Parallels.
With a VM, the limitation is Parallels itself. Parallels has to be able to recognize the external HDD's physical partition as if it was a BootCamp partition. Perhaps what Eru saw was someone who succeeded in fooling Parallels into doing this.
