It would be awesome to be able to "boot" the VM from the Apple BootCamp windows partition. That way I would get the same environment if I dual boot vs VM boot.
The Windows driver profiles required by Parallels' emulated hardware versus the particular Mac's real hardware are very different from one another. It would be like taking a Windows installation and moving it from, say, a Dell laptop to an HP desktop: Windows doesn't take kindly to that sort of thing. You may someday be able to boot from a partition instead of an image, but it won't be a partition you'd also be able to use with Boot Camp.
My Windows knowledge is fairly limited, but can you not install drivers needed by both Boot Camp and Parallels? Most OSes I've used will load the right drivers based on what hardware it's booting on. Does Windows not do that?
I have every hope that Parallels will try to master this feature, but they would be doing something that VMware, QEMU, XEN, WinPro, et al have not been able to accomplish for years with hundreds of developers. The virtual system disk is going to be around for a while, and I'ld bet that M$ will find a way to kill that in their upcoming windoze version. The history of running windoze under another OS is littered with M$ releases that defeat or make difficult emulation/virtualization. Read some history of OS/2 V2.0 and see what M$ did back then.
To a POINT, the breaking poing being the motherboard drivers, specifically the PCI routing controller, and more important the AGPGart or PCI-Express level interface, which are tied very tightly to the kernel. Linux has the same problem if you actually GET the AGPGart working so 3d works or build into the kernel one of the many buggy RAID drivers. (the driver isn't so much buggy as the way some of them handle the hardware not being found is) The apple folks actually used to have it quite easy on this - you unplug a drive from one System 9 machine and plug it into another, I'd bet dimes to dollars it will work... Since they grew up and went to OS X though, you'll find that trick doesn't really work as well as it used to - Especially switching between processors and even certain video cards (like I know for a fact a Rage LT/G3's install won't even BOOT on a nVidia/G5) Thank the unix legacy it inherited. Parallels, just like VMWare and M$ VPC (the windows version) pretends to be a different mainboard, drive controller, network controller and video card than the host system... That's asking an awful lot of the OS. In fact, I can only think of two operating systems I'd trust to handle that properly; BeOS and MacOS (9 or earlier) Though I would like to see the ability to use a dedicated partition directly, just because it would be FASTER than dealing with the overhead of the host OS filesystem... Especially in a setup like mine where I could devote a high speed removable drive to it. (I have a hot plug 80 pin SCSI 160 and a hot plug SATA bay in my workstation)
