Importing Boot Camp to VM?

[hamah]

I currently use OS X 10.4 but will upgrade later this week to 10.5. I currently have Parallels 2.5 installed with a Boot Camp XP installation. I no longer want a HD partition for Boot Camp and wish to import the Boot Camp XP into a virtual machine. Paralles cannot do this with release 3 (although they have it on the roadmap). Can Fusion do this?

I will also be creating a VM for Solaris 10 and I have heard great things about Fusion over Parallels in this application so it is likely I will purchase Fusion regardless if it can import a Boot Camp installation into a VM or not. I'll just remove the partition and reinstall XP into a VM if I have to.

Thanks for any info or insight you might provide.

[bgertzfield]

Sorry, VMware Fusion doesn't currently have this feature built-in. However, you can install the free VMware Converter inside Boot Camp:

http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/



Enable Windows Sharing on your Mac, then install Converter in Boot Camp. Boot your Boot Camp partition as a VM. You can then do a "live" conversion of your Boot Camp partition into a virtual machine, and store the result on your Mac over Windows file sharing.

Good luck!

[hamah]

Would a similar approach be to boot into Boot Camp as a physical machine and use Converter to create a VM which would be saved to a CD or USB stick? I suppose I would then use Fusion to import/convert the XP VM. I would think so but just want to be sure. For some reason I would feel more comfortable with this more "traditional" approach. We have used P2V in the past to do ESX implementations at client datacenters for DR purposes so this is a concept I can get my head around.

Don't know why I did not think of the conversion tools VMware has made available. This could be just the answer. Thank you.

Any "gotchas"? Am I missing anything?

[bgertzfield · Accepted solution]

Would a similar approach be to boot into Boot Camp as a physical machine and use Converter to create a VM which would be saved to a CD or USB stick? I suppose I would then use Fusion to import/convert the XP VM. I would think so but just want to be sure. For some reason I would feel more comfortable with this more "traditional" approach. We have used P2V in the past to do ESX implementations at client datacenters for DR purposes so this is a concept I can get my head around.

Yes, that'd be fine; both are essentially equivalent. VMware Converter really only deals with the disk—it doesn't care if it's running in a virtual machine or not. (In fact, we do most of our testing inside virtual machines.

[fbx]

I tried this a few weeks ago and came up lost. The converter made a fine copy of the Boot Camp partition on my external HD, but when I tried to import that back to the OSX drive I was told there wasn't enough room to do so, it want to bring in a 105 GB drive! I had about 30GB on my Boot Camp partition, but the partition itself was 140G.

Eventually I gave up.