https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4810526 Opened this discussion and got no reply. Can someone help me here? "Hi. I had a hd booting Lion 10.7.4. I bought a SSD and installed Lion via pendrive with that recovery assistant Apple provides. Lion came as 10.7.5. Also, I removed my CD drive and installed the old hd, having a second internal HD. I have a Macbook Pro 17' Late 2011. Booting from my SSD, I have Parallels 7.0 installed, already running Windows 7. I had already installed a whole bunch of programs in the old hd, and some of them I cannot access through the ssd boot... such as Adobe and Office What I wanted to do: I want to boot my old hd as a virtual machine, so that I don't have to restart the computer every time i want to run those apps! I tried via Parallels and even via Apple features, but couldn't. Haven't found any info around for a case exactly like mine. Thanks in advance VÃtor"
The solution is something like: 1. Back it up (the system you want to have as a VM) with Time Machine (should also work with carbon copy cloner or super duper). 2. Create a new Lion VM 3a. Start the VM in Recovery Mode and do a Restore from TM backup. 3b. If you used CCC or SD use the restore functionality of those programs. Note: There's is no hardware acceleration for OSX working as a VM, so you might want to rethink about those Adobe programs (forget about doing heavy photo/graphic editing that uses GPU).
Ain't there another way of doing this? Just "activate" the VM? Because I don't even have enough space left to back everything up and then access. It backups absolutely everything; doing this with a 500gb+ boot becomes unhandly... Maybe a "fake" VM, just allowing to access it? Since I can access my old HD files from this Boot, would it conflict? (Correct me if I am wrong: With time machine, the whole boot becomes a "file", and booting from the SSD and installing this backup would simply activate that "file", which was 100% inactive, while the "real" boot is being read in a different way/slaveish, with some important system files being accessed even if not booting from it? [Don't know if I was clear enough...?] ) Thanks in advance VÃtor
Your REAL question is: Does Parallels support OS X Virtual Machines based directly on real OS X partitions, like it does for Windows in Bootcamp? The answer is: No.
