Convert Bootcamp to VM or just create a new VM

[HobbitFootAussi]

My new MBP is coming on Wednesday (currently using first gen MBP). My first inclination was to just create a new Winx64 VM and reinstall everything. I still plan to try that to see which performance-wise will be better, just not right away.

So until I do that I thought what would be the best way to move my Bootcamp partition to the new MBP for use within VMWare. Today I used VMWare Converter to convert my Bootcamp partition to a VM on an external drive. I ran the tool while within VMWare. I then started up the VM, upgraded it and it worked perfectly. The Windows install is not one that I \*need* a reinstall for like many do after running for months as its actually not that old as I only keep VS 2005 and SDKs for development. I am keeping my Bootcamp partition around for now a backup.

So my question is will the converted VM (which seems to be using SCSI) work as well as creating a new Win32 VM from scratch?

Message was edited by:

HobbitFootAussie

[Obeechi]

Are you running this external drive as a startup drive when you open up the vm?

What's your reason for the switch?

I just opened up my vista bootcamp for the first time.. .noticed that there is no suspend and resume, as they are grayed out... is it supposed to be this way or is my partition too full?..

I really like those features... though maybe I could use hibernation?

[admin]

I just opened up my vista bootcamp for the first time.. .noticed that there is no suspend and resume, as they are grayed out... is it supposed to be this way or is my partition too full?

That is intentional. If you were to suspend or snapshot a bootcamp VM, then boot natively into that partition, the snapshot/suspend state would no longer be valid and would probably cause corruption.

[HobbitFootAussi]

Well so here are my reasons:

1) I rarely use Bootcamp. Mainly for Half-Life 2: EP1 for the rare times I have time for that.

2) Since I'm switching to a new MBP I am not keen to resetup BootCamp and reinstall everything immediately.

The external drive I only used because with Bootcamp on my internal MBP drive, I don't have enough room to have both BootCamp and a virtual disk based VM. So I needed to copy it to an external drive. And since I want to keep my BootCamp partition on this MBP instead of deleting it (this MBP is going to be used for kids and as a backup - lucky kids) I have to keep on the external drive until my new MBP arrives via Fedex on Wednesday. Once I get that, I'll copy it to my new MBP.

So one extra thing I did was to create a new Virtual Machine and use the converted disks as its disk instead of creating a new one. This ensured that I had the best VM settings and again - it works great Again I still plan to run XPx64 on the new MBP later when I have more time and test VS2005 performance against XP32. One thing that made me reconsider doing it immediately was I found out that VS2005 creates 64-bit apps, but is not one itself so no speed improvement there. So I'd probably see speed improvements in Windows itself, but not the main apps I use. As such there may be little point.

And one thing I like about a non-BootCamp VM is I get suspend which is frankly nicer than using XP's hibernate since for some reason I had issues with that anyway.

Now...I would pay for VMWare in its current incarnation but would like to see 3 things in the final release:

1) Unity finished (obviously it will be) with lots of custom config options in the vmx file

2) DirectX made more stable and I'd love OpenGL to be supported. My reason is the one game I play on Windows - Half Life 2.

3) Not a full snapshot manager, but a way to create a snapshot for the base OS and then a second one for before I do something big without blowing away the base snapshot. In other words I think just two will suffice for MOST users (obviously not really power users). One might be too little.

[vinayv]

What sort of config options. I can't promise we'll do even any of them for 1.0, but at least if know them we can consider them for future releases

[HobbitFootAussi]

Mainly how Unity handles keyboards - I don't want it to change anything from normal VM. I like using CTRL-C/X/V for copy/paste for Windows apps. I'm too used to it and I use it with other CTRL-KEY combinations so I don't want it to interfere.

[vinayv · Accepted solution]

CTRL-keys still work as you expect. We only intercept the Apple-Key. We do this for window mode changes, and a couple of other menu items. In other cases the Apple-Key is translated to a ctrl-key and sent to the VM. The side effect of this is that you can't easily send the "windows" key to windows. Other than that, all other keyboard shortcuts should work as you expect.

[HobbitFootAussi]

Correct, but in this case I don't want even the Apple key to be intercepted.