there's a problem with your concept of real partition usage.
Just so everyone here knows, (hopefully I'm wrong but) i believe that there are going to be problems if parallels does end up allowing us to use our bootcamp partition as a boot partition (with read/write permissions). First of all xp will probably see the different operating environment (parallels virtual machine with it's virtual bios and virtual hardware) as a different machine from the bootcamp environment (which is your native mac hardware with mac-boot-level hardware drivers etc). That means windows activation problems unless you're lucky enough to own a corporate version of XP pro sp2. it probably means your license will expire since my memory tells me there's a limit to the number of hardware changes xp's activation allows before you have to purchase another activation. I konw you can call microsoft and say you're reinstalling, but I doubt they'll do that for you every time you change from using bootcamp to parallels and vice versa!
So once you get around activation problems, XP still won't work in both environments without having to fix itself majorly upon every fresh start in the other environment. By fixing itself I mean needing the xp disk to install lots (I mean LOTS) of hardware drivers, and it won't find several of them probably each time so you'll have to manually fix it. I know this happens from experience with vmware's similar capability of booting from a real partition (it famously screws up the partition so it's unuseable as a native windows xp boot partition from then on.) So it's likely you'll kill your bootcamp install if you try to run parallels from it in this manner.
I've been tossing around ideas of read only windows installs but nothing jives in my head, speaking as an experienced software developer but not an OS or virtual machine developer so no doubt somebody at parallels has already thought of this and it is the cause of the delay in this feature's release. Either parallels' dev team has an idea of how to work around the problem and is working on it but it's taking time, or they haven't found a workaround yet and are either leaving it out for now or will allow partition booting but will recommend against sharing your install with bootcamp.
Now the GOOD news is that having partition-level access is that you could conceivably have one partition which contains your documents (your "my documents" hahaha), and that could be shared by bootcamp and parallels so you would be able to work on the same files using either environment (parallels or bootcamp). However it wouldn't save much space at the beginning of your XP use since you'd still have to install xp twice and install all (or at least most) of your applications twice (anything that needed to customize the registry and/or install dlls in your windows system folders, stuff like that). But you'd only have one copy of everything you download, one copy of everything you're editing (word files, graphics, development stuff, music, saved games, chat histories, etc.)
I hope that's correct information and helpful information, if you doubt what I'm saying about XP handling the environments differently try taking your windows hard drive out of your pc and installing it in another pc with a similar motherboard and similar processor but different bios manufacturer, different hard drive manufacturer and size, different ram config, different usb/serial/parallel/ps2/keyboard/mouse/display/sound/3d/battery/chipset. You'll see windows take an extra hour to startup and will require you to help it figure out it's driver problems every 2 minutes along the way. That's my experience anyway. And that's more or less the difference in what xp sees between bootcamp and parallels.
Good luck with this idea and I hope parallels can prove me wrong! I'd love to share my xp install and applications installs as well, I just don't think it can be done. Maybe though there's a setting in windows to allow different hardware profiles??? that might solve this problem but I don't know how to do it.
Cheers,
Dkelley
Last edited: May 31, 2006
