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Is there any Virtualization Software that Can use Boot Camp's Windows XP Instllation?


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Hi everyone,

I'm a newbie to virtualization, and i have been trying to research this to the best of my abilities but havent found a solution yet for my question: I have Boot Camp running on my MacBook with Windows XP installed. I wanted to know if there is any virtualization software that would allow me to use the Windows XP i already have installed via Boot Camp so that i dont have to waste hard drive space installing another version of Windows XP for use with the virtualization software.

I hope this makes sense, and would appeciate an advice anone has to offer!

Thanks

Terry

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  • 3 weeks later...

Not sure if any other products have this feature yet but I'm sure they are working on it...just like Parallels (see the section titled Boot Camp & Vista Beta2 posted on Tuesday, May 30, 2006 @ http://parallelsvirtualization.blogspot.com/)

 

"There have been a number of comments (and direct emails to me) that are some variation of the following two you'll find below. Answers are inline:

 

* I've been playing with Boot Camp and Parallels Desktop. Why can't I use the hard disk partition I created with Boot Camp as the Windows image for Parallels?

 

ANSWER: Right now, Parallels Desktop does not include a "Use Real Partition" feature that will enable you to use your Boot Camp partition for Parallels. This feature is in our plans though, so stay tuned. Until its available, you'll need to perform a full installation to work with Windows in a virtual machine."

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  • 3 weeks later...

People, you need to remember that XP (and Windows in general) is not as tolerant of massive hardware changes as OS X is. Changing from a virtual environment to a native install or vice versa will usually wreck havoc with XP's drivers, not to mention activation problems (the two environments would be seen as different computers). Give it a try with VMWare sometime, it just doesn't work right, and likely never will with Windows' current driver architecture.

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  • 2 weeks later...

the main issue is most likely the fact that currently we are not able to write to ntfs partitions from osx - once that issue is straightened out i believe we will see many virtualization applications write directly to your boot camp install. I especially forsee this happening in Virtual PC.

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  • 5 weeks later...
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