Support for Virtual and Real Disks

This section lists the types of disks that can be used by Parallels virtual machines and provides the information about basic operations you can perform on these disks.

Supported Types of Hard Disks

Parallels virtual machines can use either virtual hard disks or Boot Camp partitions or physical disks as their hard disks.

Virtual Hard Disks

The capacity of a virtual hard disk can be set from 100 MB to 2 TB.

Virtual hard disks can be of either plain or expanding format.

plain

A plain virtual hard disk image file has a fixed size. The size is determined when the disk is created.

expanding

An expanding virtual hard disk image file is small initially. Its size grows as you add applications and data to the virtual hard disk in the guest OS.

When you create a virtual machine, the disk is created in the expanding format. You can change the disk format in the Hard Disk pane of the Virtual Machine Configuration dialog. To add a plain hard disk to your virtual machine, clear the Expanding disk option when adding a hard disk to the virtual machine.

Split Disks

A virtual disk of either format can be a single-piece disk or a split disk. A split disk is cut into 2 GB pieces and is stored as a single .hdd file.

Note: In most cases, you don't need this type of disks. They are needed only for virtual machines residing on FAT32 drives.

Boot Camp Partitions

With Parallels Desktop, you can choose how to use your Boot Camp Windows XP (or later) operating system: to boot in it natively (via Boot Camp) or in a virtual machine (via Parallels Desktop). A Boot Camp Windows partition can be used as a bootable disk or as a data disk in Parallels virtual machines. For detailed information, see Use Boot Camp with Parallels Desktop.

Physical Disks

Parallels Desktop allows you to connect physical disks directly to virtual machines as internal disks. When connected this way, physical disks work faster than via USB. You can either boot virtual machines from such disks or connect them as secondary and work with the disk data.

Parallels Desktop allows you to connect physical disks directly to virtual machines and use such disks as internal. When a physical disk is connected to a virtual machine as internal, it works faster than

CD/DVD Discs and Their Images

Parallels Desktop can access real CD/DVD discs and images of CD/DVD discs.

Parallels Desktop has no limitations on using multi-session CD/DVD discs. A virtual machine can play back audio CDs without any limitations on copy-protected discs.

If your host computer has a recordable optical drive, you can use it to burn CD or DVD discs in a virtual machine.

Parallels Desktop supports CD/DVD disc images in the ISO, CUE, and CCD formats.

Note: DMG disk images made with macOS Disk Utility are also supported by Parallels Desktop. When creating such an image, make sure you create a read-only and uncompressed image without any encryption.

Floppy Disks and Floppy Disk Images

Parallels Desktop can use two types of floppy disks:

  • Real diskettes inserted into a real floppy disk drive that is connected to the virtual machine.
  • Floppy disk image files having the .fdd extension and connected to the virtual machine.

Parallels Desktop treats floppy disk images like real diskettes. Parallels Desktop supports floppy disk image files that have the .fdd extension and 1.44 MB size.
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