Parallels Boot Camp Feature?

[juan_cl]

What is stopping us from using the Boot Camp feature from Parallels? Maybe a hacked boot file or something will make Parallels recognize the partiton?

 

PS:this is for hackintosh users

[holden caulfield]

the new beta version of parallels can boot from the bootcamp partition. check the news on the front page.

[juan_cl]

what I mean is that us hackintosh users have that option grayed out.

[holden caulfield]

oh. sorry.

[macgirl]

what I mean is that us hackintosh users have that option grayed out.

That is because Hackintoshes doesn´t have BootCamp Partitions (AKA GUI partitioned drives). Maybe when MacEFI X86 appears it should be possible.

[juan_cl]

yeah, but parallels relies on just that?

[Hagar]

I fiddled with this.. replacing the .hdd file with a symlink to a fat32 or ntfs partition doesn't work

 

The question is what will a: enable the feature & b: what sort of thing is needed to satisfy parallels' requirements for a "valid" partition..

 

clearly this needs more study..

[JaS]

Maybe partition the hard disk with guid and install os x on the first partition , and using something like dd to put an image of xp on to the second ... + acronis os selector ... could be a solution.

[bubugugu]

just a quick question - will parallels work on single core sse2 cpus?

[hiroo]

I'm having this problem too. I have a separate physical hard disk attached that has Windows installed. Obviously since this is an hackintosh, i don't need Boot Camp to actually boot into windows (I use the bios boot drive selector) but Parallels is looking for something to enable the use Boot Camp feature. If you look on the parallels forum, other people are having this problem on real macs too. Maybe they will loosen the criteria somehow.

 

in the meantime, if anybody has any clues as to which direction to look, please post.

[BladeRunner]

just a quick question - will parallels work on single core sse2 cpus?

 

I can't speak to the SSE2 part, but I do know that it would NOT start until I replaced my graphics card with one that could support CI/QE. What would happen was the Parallels icon would appear for a short time in the DOC and then just fade away with no error indication of any type. Once I got CI/QU working on my GeForce FX 5500 Parallels started and ran just fine.

[Mr.Sticky]

I have tried workarounds on this by formatting a drive GUID and putting windows on it.

That didn't work, Parallels still doesnt find bootcamp. So, i downloaded Bootcamp and tried to install it.. but it will only install on the current drive you've booted from (which is my mbr disk).

 

So i restored a backup on to a partition of my GUID disk and booted it (i was able to do this by leaving the Install DVD in the drive and letting the timer run out, otherwise there's no way to boot it i found).

Anyway, once i got in to osx installed Bootcamp 1.21 and tried to run it, i got an error saying i "needed to update my firmware" for bootcamp to work. Obviously this is a dead end. I looked in the app package and couldnt find any scripts to change.

 

Looks like we'll have to wait for the Parallels team to change this feature..

 

IAN

[CPngN]

Yeah I was bummed too when I read about the ability to use the raw partition, and double bummed when I just read about boot camp using EFI. So close, and yet so far.

So I guess this is just my "I'm interested in seeing this work too" post.

 

FYI I used Acronis True Image to repartition my drive and currently use Acronis Boot Selector to switch at boot time.

[hiroo]

ok, so parallels finally added support for manually editing the config file to boot from a physical drive. it works for me although the inconvenient part is that often the drive number will change when i reboot the machine and then you have to edit the config file again.

 

the main problem i have now is that sound doesn't work in parallels when i boot from the physical hard disk. it says "error writing to sound device, loopback will be used." whatever loopback is, it isn't working.

 

anybody else experience this and find a solution?

[dong]

the main problem i have now is that sound doesn't work in parallels when i boot from the physical hard disk. it says "error writing to sound device, loopback will be used." whatever loopback is, it isn't working.

 

Does the linein work for your osx? If not, this can be the reason and the fix is to set it to none for the virtual machine.

[whodiini]

Holy cow! Dual Boot AND Parallels working. Only things left are sound and sleep.

 

After 2 days, figured how to get a dual boot XP that Parallels also was able to boot off of:

 

My config: 2 HD, one dedicated to XP. Use f11 to decide which disk to boot off.

 

Partitioned other disk using seagate tools into 2 partitions, both FAT32 compatible with XP. This is an important step. Then put XP in on partition. Copied the boot camp support files into the partition. Then changed boot OS, and ran parallels. Installed tools, and voila, it works. Strange, in parallels XP window, cant access the other FAT32 partition, but just made it a shared folder and it all works. This way I can choose whether to run XP native or simultaneously.

 

If you dont use the seagate tools, then you have no control over the MBR. At one point, it somehow got a GUID partition map instead of a MBR. Hosed up the hard disk and had to access it via a USB adapter to get it back alive.

And you need to edit the pref files forparallels and explicitly state the partition it boots off of

Edited March 1, 2007 by whodiini

[hiroo]

Holy cow! Dual Boot AND Parallels working. Only things left are sound and sleep.

 

After 2 days, figured how to get a dual boot XP that Parallels also was able to boot off of:

 

My config: 2 HD, one dedicated to XP. Use f11 to decide which disk to boot off.

 

Partitioned other disk using seagate tools into 2 partitions, both FAT32 compatible with XP. This is an important step. Then put XP in on partition. Copied the boot camp support files into the partition. Then changed boot OS, and ran parallels. Installed tools, and voila, it works. Strange, in parallels XP window, cant access the other FAT32 partition, but just made it a shared folder and it all works. This way I can choose whether to run XP native or simultaneously.

 

If you dont use the seagate tools, then you have no control over the MBR. At one point, it somehow got a GUID partition map instead of a MBR. Hosed up the hard disk and had to access it via a USB adapter to get it back alive.

And you need to edit the pref files forparallels and explicitly state the partition it boots off of

 

congrats on getting things working. however, i have two hard disks also, one mac and one xp. for the xp one i didn't do anything special in terms of formatting or partitioning; i think i just used the formatter on the xp install disc. it worked fine for dual boot but i couldn't get parallels to recognize the xp disc until the recent update where they gave you the ability to edit the config file to specify the disk and partition (disk0s1) that you wanted parallels to use. once i did that, parallels booted right up and installed parallels tools and i was in business, except for the sound.

[hiroo]

Does the linein work for your osx? If not, this can be the reason and the fix is to set it to none for the virtual machine.

 

great suggestion! i went to the virtual machine config and turned sound input to null device and now sound output works great from the XP drive under parallels.

 

i guess when i saw "writing to" and sound not working, i assumed it was sound output, not input. since sound output is working (but not input) on my hackintosh, i guess that tripped up parallels somehow.

 

thanks!

[NeSuKuN]

one question, ¿Doesn't paralells video drivers conflict with your current GPU video drivers?

[hiroo]

one question, ¿Doesn't paralells video drivers conflict with your current GPU video drivers?

 

i am not sure what parallels does about this but the short answer is no, there isn't any conflict. i think they use xp's hardware profile feature to switch the hardware between the parallels virtual video and when you direct boot it goes back to the direct hardware drivers.

[demenion]

Ok so the new version of parallels shouldn't have a problem picking up a existing WinXP install as long as it is fat32?

[Zulu.Walker]

Been using Parallels on my WinXP SP2 real OS (the one I had before OSX86, no installing done) since RC1, just mod the parallels config file (*.pvs under your Documents folder) to boot from your disk partition where your Windows OS resides (in my case the line is: Disk 0:0 image = Boot Camp, disk2s1). This will boot your Windows partition under BootCamp mode. As far as I can tell, Parallels creates another hardware configuration file for Windows, and if you are quick enough you'll see that Parallels' own configuration boots by adding a bootloader option to boot with Parallels' virtual hardware (I don't dare to run with the drivers I installed under Windows). Rebooting into WindowsXP natively provides no change in anything, providing full functionality within Mac and Win native. No disk corruption and any problems yet, Windows even boots faster under Parallels than when booted natively.

 

 

Parallels is a godsend, I don't even need to boot into Windows anymore unless I wanna play a DX9 game, I even use Adobe's Production Suite Premium under Parallels' BootCamp feature (haven't dared to try Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0, but I'm guessing it'll work somewhat), tried video encoding and sound encoding too without any problems, burnt custom DVDs with Encore DVD under emulation too. Haven't tried Avid Media Composer under Parallels, but I do my work under WinXP native and my media drives are not seen. The only thing that will truly make me forget about booting natively is 3D-support and multiple core support, which will be soon added. VMware Fusion already has beta DX8.1 support, but I hate Fusion for extending my booting time with all their vmmon/vmnet/vmdhcp/vmxxxx boot extensions as well as being slower than Parallels (build3168 vs beta2). Comparatively, Fusion doesn't even come close to Parallels' virtual machine booting time with my personal experiences.

 

Hey, Coherence is cool too. I'd always hated keypresses to release mouse cursors and whatnot. Coming back to its BootCamp feature, I'm confident to say that they have a killer app right here that will work as advertised, without any problems. With the newest build's faster file transfer from Mac-Windows and vice-versa, I don't even have MacFuse in my system anymore (MacDrive 6.1.4 [6.1.5 is buggy] in Windows is a must though).

 

EDIT: My Windows Partition is NTFS, not FAT32, and was previously installed and was accessible under Mac even before installing Parallels. And I'm on OSX86.

Edited March 5, 2007 by Zulu.Walker

[-TiLT-]

Yeah, just wanted to post the same like Zulu.Walker because that is the official way as it is described on the parallels forum.

 

Tim Surgent - Parallels Team

 

Creating Parallels Custom Boot Camp configuration may be helpful in case Parallels Desktop is not able to determine what partition must be considered as a default "Boot Camp" partition. It may happen, for example, if Parallels has found more than one matching partition. "Custom Boot Camp" configuration also allows the user to use several partitions in one virtual machine.

 

A "Custom Boot Camp" configuration is created with the help of Parallels Desktop GUI (OS Installation Assistant or Add Hardware Assistant) and manual editing of the VM configuration (*.pvs) file. With either assistant create a virtual machine with the required number of virtual disks then edit the configuration file.

 

The following fragment of a configuration file (*.pvs) contains two hard disks definitions in the IDE devices section (the virtual machine has two virtual disks):

 

[IDE devices]

Disk 0:0 enabled = 1
Disk 0:0 = 1
Disk 0:0 media = 0
Disk 0:0 connected = 1
Disk 0:0 image = disk.hdd
Disk 0:0 cylinders = 65016
Disk 0:0 heads = 16
Disk 0:0 sectors = 63
Disk 0:1 enabled = 1
Disk 0:1 = 1
Disk 0:1 media = 0
Disk 0:1 connected = 1
Disk 0:1 image = disk2.hdd
Disk 0:1 cylinders = 65016
Disk 0:1 heads = 16
Disk 0:1 sectors = 63
Disk 1:0 enabled = 0
Disk 1:0 = 0
Disk 1:1 enabled = 0
Disk 1:1 =0

 

To replace a standard virtual disk definition by definition of a “Custom Boot Camp disk” do the following:

* change the media value to ‘1’

* replace the image value ‘disk.hdd’by a string in the following format:

 

Boot Camp;diskNsA;diskNsB;diskNsC and so on, where DiskNsY is the BSD name of a disk partition to be used in context of a “Custom Boot Camp disk”.

 

NOTE: To learn the BSD name of a partition use, for example, the console command "mount"

WARNING: Do not use partitions from different physical disks in one “Custom Boot Camp" disk. (Parallels displays an error message)

WARNING: Do not use the same partition in two "Custom Boot Camp" disks in one configuration file (Parallels displays an error message)

 

For example, we want to convert both of the virtual disks to "Custom Boot Camp disks". We want the first "Custom Boot Camp disk" to include the partition disk0s3 from disk0, the second - two partitions from disk1: disk1s1 and disk1s2. After editing, the fragment will look like the one below:

 

[IDE devices]

Disk 0:0 enabled = 1
Disk 0:0 = 1
Disk 0:0 media = 1
Disk 0:0 connected = 1
Disk 0:0 image = Boot Camp;disk0s3
Disk 0:0 cylinders = 65016
Disk 0:0 heads = 16
Disk 0:0 sectors = 63
Disk 0:1 enabled = 1
Disk 0:1 = 1
Disk 0:1 media = 1
Disk 0:1 connected = 1
Disk 0:1 image = Boot Camp;disk1s1;disk1s2
Disk 0:1 cylinders = 65016
Disk 0:1 heads = 16
Disk 0:1 sectors = 63
Disk 1:0 enabled = 0
Disk 1:0 = 0
Disk 1:1 enabled = 0
Disk 1:1 = 0

 

NOTE: IDE channel (0:0, 0:1, 1:0 and 1:1) has NOTHING with Boot Camp configuration. It just lets the Virtual Machine know which virtual IDE channel to connect the virtual HDD to. Do not change it!

[Louis80]

Hello, i'm a problem with new solution of Parallels Forum....

I have osx86 and i have on the same hard disk 2 partition:

 

the first with windows xp installed (disk0s1)

the second with osx 86.

 

so i have modified the config file *-pvs but parallels desktop say:

 

The Hard Disk 1 is set to use the Boot Camp while Boot Camp is not installed on this computer!

 

so i have installed boot camp but there is an error of firmware.... but i think that boot camp is not necessary for new solution of parallels or not?????

 

help me

 

thank you

error_parallels.tiff

[osxonmylaptop]

congrats on getting things working. however, i have two hard disks also, one mac and one xp. for the xp one i didn't do anything special in terms of formatting or partitioning; i think i just used the formatter on the xp install disc. it worked fine for dual boot but i couldn't get parallels to recognize the xp disc until the recent update where they gave you the ability to edit the config file to specify the disk and partition (disk0s1) that you wanted parallels to use. once i did that, parallels booted right up and installed parallels tools and i was in business, except for the sound.

 

Hi,

You mean that by putting "Boot Camp, disk0s1" you were able to boot your native XP into Paralells?

Because I've tryed that and got an error like invalid disk or could not find disk image, something like that...

Any suggestion?

Thanks